Waymo Crashes 68% Less Than Human Drivers, IIHS Finds
A landmark IIHS study of 50 million driverless miles shows Waymo crashes far less than human drivers—but reveals gaps in how crash data is tracked.
Waymo Crashes 68% Less Than Human Drivers, IIHS Finds
Self-driving cars have spent years promising to be safer than human drivers. Now there's real data to back that up — and it comes with some serious caveats. On July 23, 2026, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) released a comprehensive study comparing Waymo's driverless vehicles against human-driven cars across four U.S. cities. The result: Waymo's robotaxis were involved in crashes 68% less often than human drivers covering the same roads. It's the strongest independent safety endorsement Waymo has received to date, and it lands at a moment when regulators, insurers, and everyday drivers are all trying to figure out how much to trust autonomous vehicles. But the same study also found a problem with the data itself: the national system used to track AV crashes isn't built to handle the technology at scale. That combination — good news about safety, bad news about oversight — is what makes this report worth paying attention to. What the IIHS Study Actuall…
