Waymos cause "way mo" injuries per mile driven than for-hire vehicles in NYC

https://gothamist.com/news/are-waymo-robotaxis-actually-safer-than-nyc-uber-and-taxi-drivers

by laserson • 12 hours ago

10 16 12 hours ago

floxy2• 11 hours ago

Anyone have the source for the three Waymo serious injuries or deaths? I feel like I would have heard about these on HN. Only thing I've heard of is one feline fatality and a school-aged pedestrian who was bumped, but appeared not to be injured.

lotsofpulp• 11 hours ago

Presumably somewhere in the links below, although I doubt the accuracy of the claims.

https://www.openplans.org/how-for-hire-autonomous-vehicles-i...

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e71380706dc865d40a6f...

stonogo• 11 hours ago

Waymo cars are generally "involved": https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2025/09/14/waymo-...

I can only find two fatality crashes in NHTSA data, and Waymo vehicles were merely "involved" in both of them.

michael1999• 10 hours ago

Upthread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49009120

josefresco• 11 hours ago

"have a significantly higher rate of crashes with a serious injury or fatality than the existing New York City for-hire fleet"

"Waymo's fleet has not yet driven enough miles to support that they are safer than for hire vehicle drivers."

If there's not enough data to show they're "safer" than there also isn't enough data to show they are "less safe".

pedvide• 11 hours ago

That depends on what your hypothesis is. If it is that Waymo cars are safer than for-hire (which I guess it's what Waymo claims), then you need enough data to reject the null hypothesis that they are equally safe. Right now there doesn't seem to be enough data to do this, so you can't conclude they are safer. They could be equally safe or more dangerous.

tetha2• 10 hours ago

But how do you conclude then that they are less safe? They are neither proven to be more, less, or equally safe. So any statement of "more injuries" is as unfounded as "less injuries" or "just as many injuries".

That seems like the same statement, unless we apply stochastic class level subtlety.

lokar2• 11 hours ago

I thought it was the reverse. Waymo wants to be compared to all drivers, this critic says they should be compared to taxi drivers.

jfim• 10 hours ago

Part of the issue is that KSI events are so rare, and it's the same issue that AV companies face. If it takes you millions of miles to encounter a single event, how can you even start to quantify the rate of events, and even prove a different rate?

To scale it in human terms, say that you're a human driver and you're 2x better than the average human driver. If you wanted to prove that you're better than the average driver, you'd need to drive multiple hundreds of millions of miles to statistically demonstrate so.

Given that the rate is significantly lower for taxi drivers in aggregate, to prove that they're safer than taxi drivers if Waymo is 2x safer, they'd still need to drive multiple billions of miles to statistically prove that they're safer.

lokar2• 11 hours ago

Are they arguing that NYC taxi drivers are safer then average drivers nationwide?

scarmig3• 10 hours ago

Concretely, they are basing this analysis on 3 Waymos being involved in incidents involving a serious injury or fatality nationwide, versus 16 for NYC for hire ones (presumably in NYC or its immediate environs). The three incidents they're referring to involving a Waymo, for reference:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-fata...

https://www.azfamily.com/2025/09/14/1-person-killed-multi-ca...

https://abc7news.com/post/police-chase-san-francisco-waymo-p...

gruez• 10 hours ago

The three incidents they're referring to involving a Waymo, for reference

Article: "cause “way mo” fatal crashes" and "Waymo’s autonomous cars cause crashes that result in serious injuries"

In that case the phrasing in the OP is an outright lie. All of the examples provided don't suggest waymo was at fault. The first involved a driver hitting 6 cars in total (one of which is a waymo), and was charged. The second involved a motorcycle rear-ending a waymo. The last was a police chase that ended with the suspect crashing into a waymo. I don't see how anyone can conclude that waymo "caused" those crashes.

scarmig3• 9 hours ago

In fairness to the authors, legal fault is not sufficient to encompass how different vehicle types change accident risk. E.g., if someone breaks abruptly for no reason and that results in rear ending, the breaker wouldn't be "at fault," but they still share part of the actual blame. And I'm sure at least half of the accidents involving taxi cab drivers had them similarly wrong place, wrong time.

Where I object to the authors is the statistical spelunking and secret data sets that aren't publicly available but provided as a favor from NY government as a favor to the author. Are cabbies really 14x as safe as the average driver? It's impossible to say; we know nothing about the data they used to get that estimate. And some things strain credibility: what model do they suggest for Waymos being much safer than cabbies for all accidents (as supported by their own reported data), but suddenly getting much worse for serious injuries and fatal accidents, especially seeing as how all of the three accidents involving the Waymos they use involved a stationary or low speed Waymo where the Waymo is pretty clearly not at fault?

floxy2• 7 hours ago

Is this not a slam-dunk libel case?

Waymos cause "way mo" injuries per mile driven than for-hire vehicles in NYC

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