“Waymo estimates that its vehicles get into injury-causing crashes (including that detached wheel crash) 80 percent less often than human drivers. Crashes that injure pedestrians were 92 percent less common, while crashes that injure cyclists were reduced by 78 percent relative to typical human drivers.

Can we trust these statistics? In the past, experts have told Understanding AI that Waymo’s methodology is credible. Still, it’s worth being skeptical any time a company publishes research about the performance of its own product.

So for this story I wanted to judge the safety of Waymo’s vehicles in another way: by looking at the crashes themselves…

Over this six-month period, there were 41 crashes that involved some kind of driver error—either by Waymo’s software or a human driver. As we’ll see, Waymo’s software was clearly not at fault in a large majority of these crashes—in only a handful of cases did flaws in Waymo’s software even arguably play a role.”

From Understanding AI.