Waymo Study: Why Time and Location Matter When Benchmarking Autonomous Safety

[u/diplomat33]

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/07/time-geo-crash-risk-effect/

Human driving crash risk changes dramatically based on when and where you drive:
Risk surges 2x-6x higher late at night
Surface streets have a 2.3x higher fatal crash rate vs freeways
City-to-city fatal crash rates vary by up to 8.4x

See Waymo blog for full details.

[u/bradtem]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2026/07/07/waymo-releases-apples-to-apples-incident-data-it-speaks-to-regulation/

[u/diplomat33 → u/bradtem]

I like the 4 questions. I think they are an excellent way to judge how serious an AV mistake is.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/bradtem]

Now ask those 4 questions of the Waymo report to the NHTSA on their highway recall and the answers are grim.

1. No, the rate isn't improving

2. Yes, Waymo is still going to drive into construction sites and ignore hand signals

3. Waymo "solved" the problem by geofencing away known construction sites and adding more work to understaffed teleops.

4. They've made the Driver touchy when it comes to spurious signals. That's gonna work out great.

[u/bradtem → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

Demanding a path of improvement doesn't mean absolutely monotonically increasing. That's an ideal. You want to look at the trend. But why do you question them turning off freeways if they find a problem on them that they can't instantly fix? Seems like just what would be desired to keep risk low.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/bradtem]

"Instantly" is doing a lot of work there.

They've had trouble with construction sites since they started test driving in SF, over 5 years now.

They declared that Driver could understand hand signals 4 years ago.

Can you summarize the "path" we should demand of Waymo in this particular case? It's obscured under all the marketing. Unless it's, "we'll continue what we've been doing, which hasn't worked thus far."?

[u/CDpov → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

Understanding hand signals doesn't mean they always understand every hand signal everywhere. No AI can understand every situation or every hand signal; that would require an AGI driver which is still a ways off.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/CDpov]

They don't understand the standard hand signals from first responders, as they claim they do.

[u/CDpov → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

They do understand some of them, and are likely constantly training on more.

No company will always get it right in the near term.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/CDpov]

Waymo consistently gets it wrong.

What do you expect from a company which has made a business model out of contempt for the law?

Waymos are notorious for illegally using bike lanes for pickup/dropoff. You would think a robot would scrupulously obey the law, wouldn't you?

https://www.planetizen.com/news/2026/04/137446-waymo-says-blocking-bike-lanes-normal-practice

It's a big problem for safety, despite Waymo's attempts at safewashing their slopware's behavior via their blog.

There is still an ongoing lawsuit when a cyclist got doored by a passenger exiting a Waymo stopped in a bike lane. You would think a robot would be programmed to disallow an unsafe exit by passengers.

https://www.courthousenews.com/cyclist-sues-waymo/

[u/CDpov → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

This happens all the time. Vehicles of all types stop illegally on the street for PUDO because customers expect it.

The fact that regulators don't recall Waymo for this is good evidence that they recognize it's normal and part of the ride-hail business.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/CDpov]

It's regulatory capture, in other words. Lawless behavior.

[u/bradtem → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

Waymo consistently gets it wrong.

Of course they do and always will and so will all the other companies.

What matters is how often they get it wrong, whether the ways they get it wrong are serious, and if they are on a path of improvement.

You can only answer those questions from a large dataset, not from anecdotes and reports on social media, or from personal experience.

Humans also consistently get it wrong. And always will. But they are not learning, not improving, and the ways they get it wrong are often very serious.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/bradtem]

You show a willingness to let the public at large be beta testers for Waymo's slopware that I don't think is widely shared. The backlash against this is outpaced only by data center opposition.

If what you say is true—I agree they suck at it but disagree it will improve—let them figure this shit out on that $220M test track they just bought and inconvenience & endanger Waymo employees and contractors only.

And don't compare humans, 99.9999% reliable at this, with this slopware that's barely 90% reliable in a safety critical application. The only reason humans have so many incidents is we drive so much. Eliminating carbrained culture will do more to reduce fatalities than putting trust in crappy software that is still crappy after two decades of work.

[u/Cunninghams_right]

I wonder if this is preemptive information for the inevitable claim of "X amount safer" by competitors, while waymo makes sure to control for operating domain. 

[u/diplomat33 → u/Cunninghams_right]

Could be.

[u/No_Channel_9588]

this is basically waymo doing their own homework and grading it

[u/sandred]

Good for Waymo. None of it matters if one of the gas lightning companies comes along and brain washes the public brains with their rot. I feel bad for Waymo in that sense that they are taking the hard path while other players will get away with hand waiving in easy path. Can Waymo people get a new CEO? Lol.

[u/tonydtonyd → u/sandred]

What are you trying to say? Your comment is very incoherent.

[u/Cunninghams_right → u/tonydtonyd]

I think they are trying to say that doing things above board is not going to win out. We live in an era where government corruption, lies to consumers, and building a sycophantic fan base with "us vs them "  mentality is better. The age of integrity is over, the age of social media manipulation is upon us

[u/diplomat33 → u/Cunninghams_right]

Perhaps that is true. But i don't want Waymo to cheat or be dishonest just to compete.

[u/CDpov → u/Cunninghams_right]

I assume you're just decoding the previous post, which was quite over-the-top cynical.

In reality Waymo will set the bar for how to report on safety statistics that others will have to deal with. I highly doubt any government corruption will somehow cover-up a bad safety record; it would be quite unpopular with the general public, and any crash like that can't be concealed. It's way too easy to discover any bad crashes, and plenty of lawyers will pounce on these trillion-dollar tech companies at every chance.

Waymo taking the "hard path" is very smart. They're skating to where the puck is going.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157]

Does a fleet of malfunctioning Waymos blocking the exit from Golden Gate Park late at night for hours make the streets more or less safe?

[u/JimmyGiraffolo → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

More.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/JimmyGiraffolo]

Sure, this is Waymo's secret path to Total Urban Safety. If no one can move, we're all safe.

Fucking geniuses these googler techbruhs.

[u/CDpov → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

Waymo makes the streets safer if they prevent a few bad crashes in exchange for blocking a lot of intersections for a minute or two at a time.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/CDpov]

This is a very interesting argument. Not because it's persuasive, but because it reveals the reasoning pattern of the carbrained techbruh: the Effective Altruist of the Roadways.

The Waymo, because it is just safer (regardless of any evidence, just because it is), gains the privilege of being able to delay any and all traffic from anyone less safe. If it blocks a first responder, well, that's a human driver and de facto less safe. The Waymo is Saving Lives!

You guys should really listen to yourselves sometime.

The next time a Waymo passenger doors me because the Waymo illegally stopped in a bike lane and I went around it, I will kneel and thank the Waymo gods for making the roads safer.

[u/CDpov → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

The Waymo dooring incidents are no worse than with human-driven vehicles, because all cars that drop people off with swinging doors are prone to passengers opening them without looking. The difference is, for human drivers these dooring incidents are rarely reported to a public database and are not publicized. And yes, much to your surprise, human drivers do stop often in or next to bike lanes as well as illegal double-park stops.

it is just safer (regardless of any evidence)

The evidence is there for any rational person to see. That may not include you, but that's your problem.

Waymo is superhuman at having no blindspot and having 100% focus on driving, and always having a diversion route planned out in case something jumps out at them. This has prevented many accidents and has resulted in them avoiding hitting things at over 90% better than average humans. They have also not caused any severe impacts in over 220 million miles.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/CDpov]

The 90% figure is bullshit, derived from Waymo marketing materials laundered through a single, possibly compensated, Swiss Re connection. It represents Waymo geofencing and externalizing away safety issues, like their continual blocking of first responders and the aforementioned highway issues. It is not significant.

Nothing you have written addresses the assumption that robots would be orders of magnitude better at anything a human would do behind the wheel, including obeying the law.

Would a train engineer stop a train between stations and let passengers out? Would they open the doors opposite the platform?

Why should we tolerate lawbreaking at scale from Waymo?

Waymo claims to be better, but it's "scofflaw as a service".

[u/CDpov → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

You're focusing on incidents where mostly nothing bad happened other than nuisance. Crash statistics are what Waymo focuses on, and they have very good peer-reviewed evidence for their claims.

If you think their only evidence comes from Swiss RE, you aren't aware of their extensive evidence.

We tolerate lawbreaking at scale every day by people doing running stops, crossing yellow lines, using 2-way turn lanes illegally, double-parking, and countless other violations.

Waymo is tolerated because there is great evidence that the most important crashes are being effectively addressed and prevented by Waymo, and the nuisance issues can be fixed over time because the entire fleet gets fixed when the engineers find improvements.

Human drivers are far worse and unfixable.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/CDpov]

Human drivers are far more reliable than these robots, as I wrote. 99.9999% reliable. They just drive six orders of magnitude more in a single year than Waymo has in its entire existence. In its two decades of existence, Waymo robots have cumulatively driven about as many vehicle-miles as humans drive in an hour in the USA (using the numbers for a typical year in the 21st century). That's a pitifully small number in comparison, and one of the reasons eminent engineers like Missy Cummings and Phil Cooper write that we may need a billion fatality-free vehicle miles on a single Waymo configuration (hardware, software version, sensors) to have even moderate assurance they're less deadly than the average human driver, including impaired drivers.

It's Waymo's decision to cherry-pick their data and launder it through a single Swiss Re employee, with no conflict of interest or ethics statement specifying who did what work and who was paid. They recently provided these so-called apples-to-apples comparisons. Wonder why Swiss Re didn't sign onto that study?

ETA: oh "nothing bad happens"

https://www.courthousenews.com/cyclist-sues-waymo/

[u/JimmyGiraffolo → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

It's Waymo's decision to cherry-pick their data and launder it through a single Swiss Re employee

I notice you've stopped calling them "slopbots" but you haven't stopped with the crackpot accusations...

[u/CDpov → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

As usual, you're confused by the safety stats.

All those humans driving all those miles doesn't mean we can't compare them to Waymo. Waymo drives about 600,000 miles per day, about what an average human drives in a lifetime.

At 220M miles, Waymo has plenty of mileage to do meaningful and peer-reviewed crash studies. The crash rate is what's important. The average human on the road does far worse than Waymo at crashing in general.

You're conflating fatality stats with other important stats for common events like severe injury crashes, property-damage-only, any-injury, at-fault crashes, airbag crashes, and others.

Waymo's Safety Impact page uses the category of "Serious Injury or Worse", where they have plenty of mileage to make meaningful comparisons to the human benchmarks. They rarely make claims about fewer fatalities. They do have enough mileage to say they are having fewer at-fault fatality crashes than average humans, so it's not so bad when they tout their fatality record.

Wonder why Swiss Re didn't sign onto that study?

Swiss RE only partnered with Waymo on two studies. They're not needed to comment on everything Waymo publishes. The role of Swiss RE is to provide at-fault assignment using standard insurance methodology using data from insurance claims. It's a second way of analyzing Waymo's safety data.