Waymos Aren’t Going to Solve Traffic Deaths

Boosters paint a future in which driverless vehicles drastically improve road safety. The reality looks pretty different.

Every week, it seems, Waymos pop up in another U.S. city. And as these Alphabet-backed robotaxis spread, so do the fights over them, at just about every level of government. Last week, Washington D.C. Councilmember Charles Allen introduced a bill to operationalize self-driving taxis there after the council seemed poised to stall a prospective rollout earlier this month. In New York City, when Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently let a permit allowing Waymo testing expire, Governor Kathy Hochul reversed course on the issue by withdrawing an earlier proposal that would have allowed tech companies to start picking up passengers with driverless cars outside the city limits.

In reaction to the political pushback, robotaxi enthusiasts present a straightforward moral arithmetic: that an irrational tech backlash and provincial concerns about protecting taxi and rideshare drivers’ jobs are holding back a revolution in road safety that will save tens of thousands of lives per year. To be sure, early data from Waymo looks promising. Compared to the average human driver in places where it operates, Waymo reports that its vehicles are 92 percent less likely to be involved in crashes with serious injuries or fatalities, and 92 percent less likely to be involved in crashes where pedestrians are injured. Extrapolating from these and other numbers, maximalist visions for what self-driving cars could mean for road safety promise that they could be the key to “eliminating traffic deaths as a leading cause of mortality in the United States,” as one New York Times op-ed suggested. The Argument’s Kelsey Piper dubbed them “a pretty good cure for car accidents,” before claiming (provocatively) that “autonomous vehicles will save more people than a cure for most cancers.”

This is an attractive story in a country where, last year, 36,640 people died in traffic fatalities, and where—despite recent improvements—roads remain far more dangerous than in other wealthy countries. Could Waymo be the solution? And if so, who would be stupid enough to stop it?

Experts, however, caution against overinterpreting Waymo’s one-to-one comparisons as definitive proof that its cars are currently safer than human drivers. “No one has enough data to know anything about fatalities yet,” said Philip Koopman, a longtime researcher of self-driving vehicle safety and emeritus professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon. Waymo’s fleet of roughly 3,000 vehicles has by now traveled at least 200 million miles. “They’re going to have to go a billion miles before we know how fatalities turn out,” Koopman told me. “If they want to claim they’re safer than people, they don’t have the data yet.” Even Waymo has walked back claims that its technology is “already reducing traffic injuries and fatalities,” acknowledging that there simply isn’t enough data to make that case.

So far, Koopman........

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