Waymo says it used input from SF leaders to create new safety dashboard

Waymo officials said the company’s first-of-its-kind online safety dashboard stemmed, at least in part, from conversations with San Francisco leaders and The City’s own data.

The autonomous-vehicle firm unveiled the tool, which it’s calling the road safety data hub , Thursday in an effort to provide transparency amid ongoing questions over the viability and safety of self-driving car technology. It provides publicly available data on Waymo cars’ safety records on a quarterly basis and compares such metrics to human drivers.

Waymo officials claimed the database will set a “new standard for transparency in the AV industry.”

“It goes beyond what we’re required to do through regulatory requirements,” said John Scanlon, a Waymo safety researcher. “It’s something that we’re going to continue to update and let people follow along with as more miles are accumulated.”

Waymo researchers said they hope the dashboard builds public trust and is used by other independent researchers who can verify Waymo’s findings and advance the company’s research.

“This is an effort to both look at standardizing or creating a best practice for valid methodology and using that together with making this data available using the principles of open science to create valid assessments and public trust,” said Trent Victor, Waymo’s director of safety research and best practices.

The company launched the data hub as it continues to bolster its presence in San Francisco, the city that the AV industry has made its foremost laboratory to test the technology .

Victor said the company received feedback from city leaders when creating the database.

“We are in continuous discussions with San Francisco stakeholders, and some of the data we’re sharing has been requested by them, like location, zip code and crash data,” Victor said.

Many San Francisco leaders have loudly criticized robotaxis due to safety and traffic concerns, especially on The City’s many narrow and crowded streets.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin called out self-driving car companies for using San Franciscans as “guinea pigs,” and criticism intensified after an October crash in The City in which a Cruise robotaxi seriously injured a pedestrian by striking and dragging her about 20 feet. The crash caused ramifications throughout the industry, and Cruise ultimately pulled its entire self-driving fleet.

But Waymo and other AV companies’ main selling point has long been that their vehicles are vastly safer to ride in than ones with humans behind the wheel.

Waymo leaders said they hope the road-safety data hub provides evidence to support that claim.

According to the dashboard’s most recent data from June, Waymo vehicles are involved in 84% fewer crashes with airbag deployment, 76% fewer injury-causing crashes and 48% fewer police-reported crashes than human-driven cars.

The safety hub displays how many ride-only miles the company’s vehicles have driven in each city it operates in, a tally the company said has not been publicly available before. As of June, Waymo vehicles had driven 5.9 million miles in San Francisco, nearly 10 million fewer than in Phoenix but nearly 5.1 million more than in Los Angeles. The company currently has 300 vehicles operating in San Francisco.

Company officials said Waymo staff worked with industry researchers, insurance companies, and academics to collect and tabulate the data. Executives also said that the research adheres to industry best practices established by the Retrospective Automated Vehicle Evaluation checklist, a set of rules created by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety outlining how to optimally evaluate automated vehicles.

Waymo has steadily expanded since receiving its permit to charge for rides without restrictions in The City in August 2023. It expanded service into the peninsula this summer and eliminated the wait list for users to order rides, making the experience comparable to other ride-hailing applications .

The National Highway Transportation Agency continues to investigate Waymo as part of a probe opened in May following nearly two dozen reports in which its robotaxis demonstrated “unexpected behavior.”