Waymo Featured in AVSC's Member Spotlight Series

2024-03-06 WARRENDALE, PA.

AVSC is excited to be featuring Waymo in our latest member spotlight. Waymo first joined AVSC in January 2023 and is one of our newer members. This spotlight focuses attention on Waymo's current operations, objectives, and accomplishments.

WARRENDALE, Pa. (March 3, 2024) – Waymo operates an all-electric Jaguar I-PACE fleet and serves paid fully autonomous rides (no human driver) to the public 24/7 in San Francisco and Phoenix, with expanded services coming soon to Los Angeles and Austin. 
 
Safety is at the core of Waymo’s service. To date, Waymo has published more than 25 safety papers which together show that the Waymo Driver performs safely across a range of evaluations that build up Waymo’s Safety Framework. For many years, Waymo has relied on its established Safety Framework — a comprehensive set of methodologies that is used to assess the safety of Waymo’s technology and operations and that guides the deployment of the Waymo Driver. Over the years, Waymo has worked to earn public trust by consistently sharing information about its safety methodologies and safety performance data and encouraging greater transparency across the industry. 
 
Recent publications from Waymo have explored aggregate performance analyses, showcasing statistically significant improvements across multiple metrics (see the latest study on collision rates, and the recent one on insurance claims) when compared to human-relative benchmarks. Prior publications frame the contribution of such analyses as one out of many methodologies and indicators that are used for the safety determination of the Waymo Driver. A key goal of Waymo’s safety case is in fact not only to demonstrate and explain how the system is determined to be ready for deployment, but also to justify that the set of metrics and acceptance criteria part of the Safety Framework are sufficient for the purpose and credible. 
 
Waymo is an active member of many standards developing organizations, including AVSC. The company is contributing to industry standardization through sharing its own best practices and frameworks for AV safety evaluation and actively engaging with many SAE committees across the spectrum of safety topics. In particular, Waymo is advocating for international standardization of valid analysis of AV crash data, and its new benchmarking methodology is a good first step as it offers best practices for that. 
 
Waymo looks forward to continuing to work with the AVSC and other standards developing organizations, as well as regulators, policymakers, and local communities to offer safe and accessible transportation options. Read more about Waymo’s safety efforts here. 
 
 
AVSC thanks Waymo for their time and hard work in the successful publication of AVSC's best practices in a joint effort to gain public trust of AVs.
 
We encourage you to revisit our site to see who is featured in our next member spotlight.