Self-driving cars beat humans on safety already. This holds for Waymos and Teslas both.

They get into less accidents, mile for mile and road type for road type, and the ones they get into trend towards less severe. Why?

Because self-driving cars don't drink and drive.

This is the critical safety edge a machine holds over a human. A top tier human driver in the top shape outperforms this generation of car AIs. But a car AI outperforms the bottom of the barrel human driver - the driver who might be tired, distracted and under influence.

I trust Tesla's data on this kind of stuff only as far as a Starship can travel on its return trip to Mars. Anything coming from Elon would have to be audited by an independent entity for me to give it an ounce of credence.

Generally you are comparing Apples and Oranges if you are comparing the safety records of i.e. Waymos to that of the general driving population.

Waymos drive under incredibly favorable circumstances. They also will simply stop or fall back on human intervention if they don't know what to do – failing in their fundamental purpose of driving from point A to point B. To actually get comparable data, you'd have to let Waymos or Teslas do the same type of drives that human drivers do, under the same curcumstances and without the option of simply stopping when they are unsure, which they simply are not capable of doing at the moment.

That doesn't mean that this type of technology is useless. Modern self-driving and adjacent tech can make human drivers much safer. I imagine, it would be quite easy to build some AI tech that has a decent success rate in recognizing inebriated drivers and stopping the cars until they have talked to a human to get cleared for driving. I personally love intelligent lane and distance assistance technology (if done well, which Tesla doesn't in my view). Cameras and other assistive technology are incredibly useful when parking even small cars and I'd enjoy letting a computer do every parking maneuver autonomously until the end of my days. The list could go on.

Waymos have cumulatively driven about 100 million miles without a safety driver as of July 2025 (https://fifthlevelconsulting.com/waymos-100-million-autonomo...) over a span of about 5 years. This is such a tiny fraction of miles driven by US (not to speak of worldwide) drivers during that time, that it can't usefully be expressed. And they've driven these miles under some of the most favorable conditions available to current self-driving technology (completely mapped areas, reliable and stable good weather, mostly slow, inner city driving, etc.). And Waymo themselves have repeatedly said that overcoming the limitations of their tech will be incredibly hard and not guaranteed.

Do you have independent studies to back up your assertion that they are safer per distance than a human driver?

They data indicated they hold an edge over drunk and incapacitated humans, not humans.

> A top tier human driver in the top shape outperforms this generation of car AIs.

Most non-impaired humans outperform the current gen. The study I saw had FSD at 10x fatalities per mile vs non-impaired drivers.