IIHS Claims Waymos Are Safer Than Human Drivers If You Squint Real Hard While Reading The Data Waymo robotaxis are either extremely dangerous or a "public health breakthrough," depending on who you ask. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has come out in favor of Waymo, declaring that its driverless cars crash less often than people. However, IIHS also freely admits having performed some statistical gymnastics to come to that conclusion, since the data to perform a direct comparison is hard to come by. It's easy to find data about crashes involving human drivers, but it's far more difficult to find comparable data for autonomous vehicles. While California has required autonomous crash reporting since 2014, and NHTSA has required the same reporting since 2021, the standards are different from those for humans. An important statistic in determining crash rates is total vehicle miles traveled. The Department of Transportation's report on Traffic Volume Trends lists annual vehicle miles traveled, going all the way back to 2000. Such mileage reporting is not required for autonomous vehicles, making it impossible to calculate a rate of crashes per mile traveled across the industry. Waymo voluntarily shares this data publicly, but other companies don't. That's why the IIHS study focuses on Waymo rather than Tesla, Zoox, or any other robotaxi company. Lies, damned lies, and statistics One of the biggest problems with this claim is the size of the various data sets. IIHS had to do a great deal of work to "clean up" the data on autonomous vehicles from 2021 to 2024 before any comparison was even possible. That meant eliminating duplicate records, as well as "situations in which the automation wasn't engaged, the vehicle wasn't on a public road, or no real crash took place." Then it applied similar standards for reporting crashes