Driverless Cars and Human Error When a driverless car makes a mistake, everyone pays attention. A robotaxi stops awkwardly in traffic. A Waymo gets confused near a construction zone. A child runs into the street and is struck. A fleet of empty autonomous cars circles a residential neighborhood. A self-driving vehicle passes a stopped school bus. The incident becomes a headline, then a symbol, then a warning: See? The robots are dangerous. But this is exactly where skepticism is needed. What if, despite the headlines, driverless cars actually make fewer mistakes, and less deadly mistakes, than human drivers? Human driving is not a gold standard but more of a mass-casualty system we have normalized. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported 39,254 traffic deaths in the United States in 2024, with a fatality rate of 1.19 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. Its early estimate for 2025 was 36,640 deaths, still a staggering number. Distracted driving alone killed 3,208 people and injured an estimated 315,167 in 2024. 1, 2 Those numbers are so large that they are hard to fathom. A human driver drifts across the centerline, runs a red light, texts through an intersection, falls asleep, or drives home drunk—tragic but familiar. A robotaxi makes a mistake, and it becomes a referendum on the future of the technology. So, the question isn’t really whether driverless cars are perfect, but whether they are safer than us. The human driver is the control group. The Failures In January 2026, a Waymo vehicle struck a child near a school in Southern California. According to reporting on the NHTSA investigation, the child ran into the street from behind a parked vehicle, and the Waymo braked from about 17 mph to under 6 mph before impact. The child reportedly suffered minor injuries.