WhatsNew2Day – Latest News And Breaking Headlines
Waymo is using insurance data to prove that its autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers. The report, the result of a collaboration first announced last year between the Alphabet-owned company and Swiss Re insurer, aims to show how driverless vehicles crash less frequently and damage less property than vehicles driven by humans.
The Waymo data comes at a time of heightened scrutiny over autonomous vehicles after California regulators voted to dramatically expand the ability of robotaxi companies to operate in San Francisco despite warnings from city officials about driverless vehicles blocking roads and delaying emergency services.
The study compares Waymo’s liability claim data with claims filed by human drivers calibrated by mileage and ZIP code. Based on Swiss Re’s data from more than 600,000 claims and more than 125 billion miles, “these baselines are extremely robust and highly significant,” Waymo says. The company plans to submit and publish this article in a peer-reviewed journal, according to Waymo spokeswoman Katherine Barna.
Waymo’s data comes at a time of heightened scrutiny over autonomous vehicles
Based on comparisons, Waymo vehicles are safer than those driven by humans. The company’s driverless vehicles, in which there was no safety driver behind the wheel, reduced the frequency of bodily injury claims by 100 percent, compared to Swiss Re’s human base of 1.11 claims per million miles. This was based on more than 3.8 million miles of fully autonomous driving done by Waymo in California and Arizona.
This applies to Waymo vehicles in autonomous mode with a safety driver behind the wheel. Those vehicles reduced injury claims by 95 percent over 35 million miles, recording 0.09 claims versus 1.09 claims per million miles for the human base. And Waymo also experienced a 76 percent drop in property damage claim frequency (down from 3.26 to 0.78 claims per million miles) compared to human drivers.
Waymo says this is the first time that liability claims data has been used to compare the safety performance of self-driving and human drivers.
“The Waymo Driver is already improving road safety in the cities where we operate, a conclusion we reached by analyzing our Driver’s safety performance and through peer-reviewed research,” said Mauricio Peña, Waymo’s director of safety. it’s a statement. “This cutting-edge study provides strong evidence that our driver is, in fact, reducing injuries on the streets of San Francisco and Phoenix today.”
The data is important because there is still an intense debate about the safety of driverless vehicles compared to human drivers. Companies like Waymo and others say driverless cars are needed as an antidote to the crisis of car fatalities, of which there are about 40,000 a year in the United States. They point out that driverless cars never get drunk, tired or distracted and are able to avoid the human errors that so often lead to accidents and deaths.
But there is a lack of certainty surrounding the safety of driverless vehicles, mainly because there are far fewer autonomous vehicles on the roads than human-driven vehicles, and therefore less data from which to draw conclusions. Humans drive close to 100 million miles between fatal crashes, so we’ll likely need hundreds of millions of miles of autonomous vehicles before we can start making more meaningful comparisons on safety.
Meanwhile, Waymo has been trying to fill in the gaps in what we know about autonomous vehicles by submitting its own data for analysis. Last year, the company produced two scientific papers comparing the performance of autonomous vehicles with human driving. The first analyzed and modeled response times when a crash is imminent, while the other presented a novel methodology to assess how well autonomous driving systems avoid crashes.
Waymo has also tried to gauge the safety of its autonomous vehicles by simulating dozens of real-world fatal crashes that took place in Arizona over nearly a decade. The Google spinoff found that replacing any of the vehicles in a two-car collision with its robot-guided vehicles would nearly eliminate all deaths.
Waymo is using insurance data about self-driving cars to bolster its safety case