But while we often hear that autonomous driving technology could make a dramatic difference, before today there has not been a published scenario-based study that we’re aware of that looks into how autonomous technology performs in scenarios that led to fatal crashes by human drivers.
Today, we’re releasing the results of a study into how the Waymo Driver might perform in such tragic situations, which builds on the research that we released in October. While the October study showed that the Waymo Driver was only involved in minor collisions over more than 6 million miles driven in reality on public roads, our most recent study shows how the Waymo Driver likely would have performed in the majority of fatal crashes that occurred on the same roads over a 10 year period. The results are encouraging.
…For our analysis, we collected information on every fatal crash that took place in Chandler, Arizona between 2008–92017. We excluded crashes that didn’t match situations that the Waymo Driver would face in the real world today, such as when crashes occurred outside of our current operating domain. Then, the data was used to carefully reconstruct each crash using best-practice methods. Once we had the reconstructions, we simulated how the Waymo Driver might have performed in each scenario.
In total, the simulated Waymo Driver completely avoided or mitigated 100% of crashes aside from the crashes in which it was struck from behind, including every instance that involved a pedestrian or cyclist (20 simulations in total). This is the first time an autonomous technology company has shared its evaluation for how the system might perform in real-world fatal crash scenarios.
…In other words, even when a human driver did something to initiate a crash, such as running a red light, the simulated Waymo Driver avoided or mitigated the vast majority of these fatal crashes.
Replaying the same scenario discussed above, for example, the simulated Waymo Driver is approaching from the right of the screen, and has the right of way at a green light. But as it approaches the intersection, it spots the speeding car approaching from the bottom, predicts that it isn’t going to stop at the red light, and slows considerably until the speeder passes, avoiding the crash:
Figure 3: Waymo Driver replacing the responder. The Waymo Driver perceives and accurately predicts the initiator.
You can read more about our methodologies and our full results in our academic paper.