Waymo has had dozens of crashes—almost all were a human driver's fault \ stacker news ~AI

Last September, I analyzed Waymo crashes through June 2024. So this section will focus on crashes between July 2024 and February 2025. During that period, Waymo reported 38 crashes that were serious enough to either cause an (alleged) injury or an airbag deployment.

In my view only one of these crashes was clearly Waymo’s fault. Waymo may have been responsible for three other crashes—there wasn’t enough information to say for certain. The remaining 34 crashes seemed to be mostly or entirely the fault of others:

The two serious crashes I mentioned at the start of this article are among 16 crashes where another vehicle crashed into a stationary Waymo (or caused a multi-car pileup involving a stationary Waymo). This included ten rear-end crashes, three side-swipe crashes, and three crashes where a vehicle coming from the opposite direction crossed the center line.

Another eight crashes involved another car (or in one case a bicycle) rear-ending a moving Waymo.

A further five crashes involved another vehicle veering into a Waymo’s right of way. This included a car running a red light, a scooter running a red light, and a car running a stop sign.

Three crashes occurred while Waymo was dropping a passenger off. The passenger opened the door and hit a passing car or bicycle. Waymo has a “Safe Exit” program to alert passengers and prevent this kind of crash, but it’s not foolproof.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 14 Apr

I think this is where many people that think autonomous driving can't work are often coming from, defensive driving.

You can teach the machine the rules and best practices for not being the cause of an accident, but reacting to chaos caused by others is a whole different thing. There's an element of instinct there, there's even situations where you look at the other driver themselves to get a read.

Reading between the lines on this article, the Waymo system seems to have issues stopping or slowing in unsafe ways that don't account for the stupidity of meat-based drivers. Even if the Waymo itself is technically correct and should be able to expect people won't just drive into it, the fact that other human drivers are still on the road is a headwind for making autonomous the safer option. At some point there has to be a flippening of sorts where there's less human drivers and that fact alone makes autonomous safer even if the tech doesn't advance (and just becomes more distributed)