Waymo Hits 274 Million Autonomous Miles: Serious Injury Rate Down 92%, Yet Safety Concerns Persist

Waymo, a subsidiary of Google, recently announced that its autonomous driving system has accumulated over 170 million miles (approximately 274 million kilometers) of driving. The company claims its system reduces severe or worse injuries by 92% and airbag-deploying crashes by 83% compared to human drivers. Currently, Waymo operates nearly 3,000 vehicles across 10 cities, logging more than 4 million miles weekly—enough to theoretically prevent one serious injury every eight days. However, several recent safety incidents have raised concerns: these include striking and injuring a child in Santa Monica, California; repeatedly passing school buses illegally in Austin, Texas; and blocking an ambulance for two minutes in early March. Many of these incidents fall outside the scope of federal mandatory reporting requirements and thus were not included in Waymo’s published safety statistics.