Waymo hits 170 million miles while avoiding serious mayhem

Waymo says its autonomous vehicles have now traveled over 170 million miles while continuing to avoid serious crashes and injuries at a rate much better than human drivers. The company updated its online safety hub to reflect the new driving figures. But despite these successes, some safety advocates are raising questions about how the company presents its technology to the public.

As of December 2025, Waymo’s fleet has driven the equivalent of “200 lifetimes of driving,” assuming every human drives the equivalent of 850,000 miles in their lifetime. But unlike those pesky humans, the Waymo Driver — which is what the company calls the combination of AI, software, and various sensors that enable its vehicles to drive autonomously — is much better at avoiding serious crashes and injuries. How much better? Waymo says its vehicles are involved in:

Waymo says that its current scale — approximately 3,000 vehicles across 10 cities, driving over 4 million miles per week — it theoretically is “preventing approximately one serious-injury crash every 8 days.” This bolsters the company’s case that autonomous vehicles can help make driving safer for everyone.

There are still incidents, including a recent one in which a Waymo vehicle struck a child outside a school in Santa Monica. The robotaxi was traveling about 17mph when it braked and struck the child near the front-right headlight, according to a preliminary investigation. Waymo said its vehicle slowed to approximately 6mph right before striking the child, who reported only minor injuries. The case is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.

The incident came after NTSB said it would also open an investigation into incidents of Waymo robotaxis driving past school buses engaged in student pickups and drop-offs in Austin, Texas. Waymo issued a safety recall in December 2025 that was meant to address this issue, but additional incidents were subsequently reported.

And then there was the report of a driverless Waymo vehicle blocking an ambulance for approximately two minutes during a mass shooting in Austin in early March. These incidents of blocking intersections or delaying emergency vehicles rarely show up in the data that Waymo is required to report to the federal government, so its not reflected in the statistics that the company is spotlighting.

In 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a standing general order (SGO) requiring automakers and tech companies to report crashes involving fully autonomous vehicles as well as Level 2 driver-assist systems. Under the SGO, companies are required to document collisions when an automated driving system was in use within 30 seconds of impact and report those incidents to the government.

Waymo takes that data and reframes it through its safety hub, with plenty of colorful charts and graphs, that help paint an overall positive image of the company’s autonomous fleet. It also has submitted its data for publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals, which requires a panel of independent researchers examine and approve. But some safety experts have expressed concern that Waymo is often presenting an incomplete picture of the safety of its technology.

In a letter to the Senate Commerce Committee last month, the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety said it recently analyzed data Waymo regularly submits to the government and found that it raised a number of questions about how the company presents itself to the public. For example, 45 percent off the crashes Waymo reports involve no passengers, meaning there is often no trigger for rear or passenger-side airbags. Also approximately 80 percent of Waymo’s crashes are rear-end impacts, compared to a national human average of about 30 percent.

“The absence of passengers in a Waymo vehicle in a crash by default lowers the injury rate and could be unrelated to the safety performance of the vehicle given that there was no occupant available to be injured,” Cathy Chase, the group’s president, writes in the letter. “Moreover, if the goal of AV operations is to transport people, claiming a safety benefit from crashes where no occupant is present is incongruous.”

Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina said this issue is addressed in Waymo’s FAQ page, in which the company acknowledges that “[p]art of the benefit is that there is sometimes no one in the Waymo vehicle.” Waymo says it considers injuries to “any person involved in the crash sequence,” including vulnerable road users like pedestrians and cyclists.

“Therefore, even if there is some benefit from the Waymo vehicle being unoccupied sometimes, it’s unlikely this unoccupied benefit alone explains Waymo’s large reduction in injury-causing crashes (the vehicle could be unoccupied all the time and still get in crashes that may injure people outside the vehicle),” the company says.

Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety also takes issue with Waymo’s miles-driven milestones, noting that in 2023 alone, Americans drove approximately 3.2 trillion miles. This means that in its entire operational history, Waymo has only covered about 0.004 percent of what humans do in a single year.

”So it really is kind of a drop in the bucket when it comes to evidence,” said Shaun Kildare, the group’s research director, in a recent interview. He noted incidents of Waymo vehicles driving past school buses or on light rail tracks as evidence that the technology is still not quite ready.

“Yes, other humans have driven onto train tracks,” Kildare said, “but when your vehicle’s doing it and you have spent billions of dollars training and prepping that driver, it should be better than the worst of our drivers out there.”