Driverless driving is much safer

The safety advantages of Waymo self-driving vehicles are impossible to ignore.

On December 2nd, the New York Times published a guest opinion piece by Dr. Jonathan Slotkin, a neurosurgeon.  Headline: "The Data on Self-Driving Cars Is Clear.  We Have to Change Course."  Here is Dr. Slotkin explaining the basis for his article:

The self-driving car company Waymo recently released data covering nearly 100 million driverless miles in four American cities through June 2025, the biggest trove of information released so far about safety. I spent weeks analyzing the data. The results were impressive. When compared with human drivers on the same roads, Waymo’s self-driving cars were involved in 91 percent fewer serious-injury-or-worse crashes and 80 percent fewer crashes causing any injury. It showed a 96 percent lower rate of injury-causing crashes at intersections, which are some of the deadliest I encounter in the trauma bay.

"Impressive" may be an undestatement.  These numbers are so compelling that they argue for the US moving as quickly as is feasible to replace human-driven cars with Waymo self-driving vehicles.

Dr. Slotkin agrees.  He calls for a paradigm shift:

In medical research, there’s a practice of ending a study early when the results are too striking to ignore. We stop when there is unexpected harm. We also stop for overwhelming benefit, when a treatment is working so well that it would be unethical to continue giving anyone a placebo. When an intervention works this clearly, you change what you do.

Slotkin notes that there are about 40,000 vehicle-related deaths each year. And that is just deaths; 3.6 million American are taken to emergency rooms as a result of vehicle collisions every year.  Being able to reduce those numbers by 80% or even 90% would seem to be transformative.  But Slotkin notes that getting to a critical mass of self-driving vehicles will be complicated:

• Waymo is the only one of the autonomous-vehicle manufacturers to release this body of data so far, so we don't know if other manufacturers such as Tesla, Zoox and Cruise have comparable safety records.
  
  
• Waymos are used for only one particular "use case", ride hail services (similar to Ubers, Lyfts and taxis).  Of course, Americans use automobiles for many reasons, such as work commutes, school drop-offs, delivery services, business trips, shopping and leisure travel.  We don't have data to study the safety of self-driving cars and compare it to more traditional human-driven vehicles for most of these use cases.
  
  
• Waymo operates in part by building a comprehensive database of the urban locales where its ride-hailing service operates.  Slotkin reports that Waymo studies every intersection in a city before it implements its service.  According to its web site, Waymos currently are providing rides in five US markets (Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and the San Franciso Bay area).  It is actively ramping up in 12 additional American markets, all major metropolitan areas, including Washington DC; and building driving experience in an additional 12 markets, including New York and one non-American market, Tokyo.  I'm disappointed that Chicago apparently isn't in its near-term plans.
  
  
• Slotkin notes that Waymos aren't yet affordable for the masses.  The equipment in each Waymo (cameras, radar, lidar and computers) costs in excess of $100,000.  Naturally, if Waymo follows the traditional pattern, it will find ways to reduce that cost to the point that it is affordable for many consumers, but we don't know how long that would take.
  
  
• There is political resistance to driverless cars in some cities, including from taxi drivers and Uber and Lyft drivers.  This also was the case a decade or so ago when Uber and Lyft were trying to break into markets traditionally served by highly-regulated taxis.  At that time, taxi drivers and the taxi companies were the organized opposition, but the new ride hail services were so popular that the political opposition was overcome.  Would the same dynamic happen with Waymo?  It's difficult to say.  Uber and Lyft generated new groups of driving professionals who could serve as a political counterweight to taxi drivers.  Those ride-share drivers are now part of the establishment with a stake in defending the status quo.  And Waymo, as a driverless technology, doesn't seem to have the ability to create a stakeholder group comparable to Uber and Lyft drivers.

Despite the clear safety benefits, it may be that the most far-reaching variable (or perhaps obstacle) to Americans' acceptance of autonomously driven vehicles will be Americans themselves.  We know from decades of experience that many Americans prefer having their own private vehicle, even when public transportation such as buses and trains are options.  Slotkin builds a compelling public safety case for adopting Waymos.  But would Americans be willing to cede the driver's seat to hi-tech? 

Slotkin cites research predicting that the switch to self-driving vehicles will take "more than a decade".  Personally, I think that underestimates it.  My guess is, it will take more than a generation for self-driving vehicles to reach a critical mass of vehicles on the road.