# Comparison of Waymo Rider-Only Crash Rates by Crash Type to Human Benchmarks at 56.7 Million Miles

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01515 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01515/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 May 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [chi0: Resource-Aware Robust Manipulation via Taming Distributional Inconsistencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09021/) (2026)
- [World Engine: Towards the Era of Post-Training for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19836/) (2026)
- [Learning to Drive in New Cities Without Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15891/) (2026)
- [DriveMRP: Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Synthetic Motion Data for Motion Risk Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02948/) (2025)
- [Unequal Trips, Unequal Places: Diagnosing and Mitigating Delay Inequity in Autonomous Vehicle Fleet Coordination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24336/) (2026)
- [From the Loss Landscape to Diverse Feature Learning in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28948/) (2026)
- [Beyond the Leaderboard: Counterfactual Diagnosis of End-to-End and VLA Driving Policies Under Domain Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22582/) (2026)
- [Vision-Language-Action Autonomous Driving Agent with Language-based Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38641/) (2026)
- [Autonomous Driving Research Requires a Community-Driven Data Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08825/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

SAE Level 4 Automated Driving Systems (ADSs) are deployed on public roads, including Waymo's Rider-Only (RO) ride-hailing service (without a driver behind the steering wheel). The objective of this study was to perform a retrospective safety assessment of Waymo's RO crash rate compared to human benchmarks, including disaggregated by crash type. Eleven crash type groups were identified from commonly relied upon crash typologies that are derived from human crash databases. Human benchmarks were aligned to the same vehicle types, road types, and locations as where the Waymo Driver operated. Waymo crashes were extracted from the NHTSA Standing General Order (SGO). RO mileage was provided by the company via a public website. Any-injury-reported, Airbag Deployment, and Suspected Serious Injury+ crash outcomes were examined because they represented previously established, safety-relevant benchmarks where statistical testing could be performed at the current mileage. Data was examined over 56.7 million RO miles through the end of January 2025, resulting in a statistically significant lower crashed vehicle rate for all crashes compared to the benchmarks in Any-Injury-Reported and Airbag Deployment, and Suspected Serious Injury+ crashes. Of the crash types, V2V Intersection crash events represented the largest total crash reduction, with a 96% reduction in Any-injury-reported (87%-99% CI) and a 91% reduction in Airbag Deployment (76%-98% CI) events. Cyclist, Motorcycle, Pedestrian, Secondary Crash, and Single Vehicle crashes were also statistically reduced for the Any-Injury-Reported outcome. There was no statistically significant disbenefit found in any of the 11 crash type groups. This study represents the first retrospective safety assessment of an RO ADS that made statistical conclusions about more serious crash outcomes and analyzed crash rates on a crash type basis.