Driverless cars are here, and they are apparently better drivers than humans, according to a new report from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The independent safety watchdog organization analyzed the accident rate of Waymo’s autonomous rideshare vehicles compared with human drivers and found that the driverless vehicles were involved in 68 percent fewer crashes per mile traveled. Crash data was examined for over 50 million driverless miles and was limited to crashes that were reported to law enforcement. Of course, there are some caveats to these findings. “The results show that, on a limited scale, these driverless cars are safer than human drivers—who can be impaired or drowsy or suffer lapses in attention,” IIHS President David Harkey said. “However, the present data collection system isn’t good enough to allow continuous monitoring of a large-scale expansion.” IIHS researchers gathered crash reports submitted to NHTSA by Cruise, Waymo, Zoox and others from 2021 to 2024 and cleaned up the data. Redundant records and crashes where the automation was not engaged were culled, eliminating a quarter of the reported crashes. Then, researchers calculated whether the remaining crashes would be severe enough to report to the police if a human were driving. Human drivers are generally required to report crashes that cause an injury or result in more than $1000 in property damage. Crashes in which an airbag deployed were classified as serious enough to report to police. Other factors defined the dataset included the nature of the impact and property damage as well as the types of injuries that were reported. That left only 22 percent of the 736 public-road crashes in which the automation was engaged likely to be police-reportable. All told, 89 crashes involved Waymo vehicles, 50 involved Cruise vehicles, 10 involved Zoox vehicles, and 10 involved other companies. Of