Autonomous System Safety by Phil Koopman – Waymo Has Improved Their Safety Messaging
Waymo backs off from their unsupported claim of reducing fatalities
See full article by Phil Koopman at Autonomous System Safety
Credit where credit is due — Waymo backed off from its unsupported Saving Lives! claim of “reducing traffic … fatalities” this past summer. This is a good thing.
Some background:1 In an earlier research paper, Waymo made the correct statement that with less than 10 million miles it was too early to determine if they were saving lives or not. (This is still true today, with Waymo having accumulated about 0.47 fatalities in about 100 million miles, which puts them within bounds for roughly-same-as-human but does not support clearly-better-than-human based on available data.) But their public-facing safety web page for a long time trumpeted a misleading and unsupported-by-data public message that they were Saving Lives!
Now they have switched to a message of careful operation and striving for Vision Zero, which is a much more sustainable message than Saving Lives!
… (see full article)
As of July 1, 2025 it changed to a claim of “making streets safer” (presumably based on an injury collision claim alone) and other points. This is arguably OK so long as it is not used as a basis for verbally claiming “saving lives” in front of an audience of regulators or legislators.
See full article by Phil Koopman at Autonomous System Safety
