Waymo’s autonomous electric taxis crash 68% less than the average human driver, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, with lower-severity crashes on average as well. But there are some important caveats that limit the data. In recent years, we’ve seen a proliferation of companies offering autonomous taxi services with “level 4” automation – the ability to operate with no driver in the car, at least in a limited (geofenced) area. The leader among these services has been Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s Alphabet, Inc. It now offers autonomous ride-hailing services in 11 US cities, covering a total area larger than a US state (okay, that state is Rhode Island… well, it’s a start). It has provided tens of millions of trips so far, which gives us an opportunity to examine the data and see how well these robots can actually drive. And it turns out… they’re pretty good. With some caveats. IIHS finds Waymo 68% safer than an *average* human The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, famous for its “Top Safety Pick” crash safety recommendations, examined federal crash reporting data for various robotaxi services from 2021-2024. It focused on Waymo, because while others are in the data set, Cruise stopped operations in 2023 and Zoox only began offering public rides in 2025. Tesla, also, is not reflected in the 2021-2024 data set, as it only began offering its Austin “robotaxi” in 2025 (with drivers in the car at the time), and has only racked up 380,000 total unsupervised miles as of this week. After cleaning up the data of redundancies and determining severity of crashes, the IIHS said that Waymo resulted in 68% fewer crashes severe enough that the average person would report them to the police, over a sample of 50 million miles driven autonomously by Waymos