Waymo reports 94% reduction in serious injury crashes across 220.6 million rider-only autonomous miles versus human baselines, while Tesla reports 7x fewer collisions with FSD engaged versus manual driving — but these measure autonomous operation versus driver assistance, respectively. ✦ AI generated
Article Author · ByteByteGo Newsletter · 2026-08-17 · original ↗
Waymo's Safety Impact hub reports 220.6 million rider-only miles through March 2026, meaning no human occupied the driver's seat for any of them. Measured against human crash rates in the same operating areas, adjusted for where within each city the service drives, the reported reductions are 94% for serious injury or worse crashes and 82% for injury-causing crashes. Tesla's Vehicle Safety Report takes a different form. It compares Teslas with Full Self-Driving (Supervised) engaged against Teslas driven manually, using the same telemetry pipeline for both, and reports 7 times fewer major and minor collisions and 5 times fewer off-highway collisions. The two reports answer different questions, and we can't simply do a side-by-side comparison. The difference comes down to what each population represents: Waymo is measuring outcomes across miles where no person was available to intervene. Tesla is measuring whether an assistance system reduces collisions while a driver remains responsible.
Read full article ↗excerpt · fair-use quotation