> In your opinion as an AV safety expert, has Waymo already demonstrated a far higher standard of driving than human drivers in collision avoidance scenarios?

That's a difficult question to answer, and the devil really is in the details, as you may have guessed. What I can say that Waymo is, by far, the most prolific publisher of research on AV safety on public roads. (yes, those are my qualifiers...)

Here's their main stash [1] but notably, three papers talk about comparison of Waymo's rider-only (i.e. no safety driver) performance vis-a-vis human driver, at 7.1 million miles [2], 25 million miles [3], 56 million miles [4]. Waymo has also been a big contributor to various AV safety standards as one would expect (FWIW, I was also a contributor to 3 of the standards... the process is sausage-making at its finest, tbh).

I haven't read thru all their papers, but some notable ones talk about the difficulty of comparing AV vs human drivers [5], and various research on characterising uncertainty / risk of collision, comparing AVs to non-impaired, eyes-on human driver [6]

As one may expect, at least one of the challenges is that human-driven collisions are almost always very _lagging indicators_ of safety (i.e. collision happened: lost property, lost limbs, lost lives, etc.)

So, net-net, Waymo still has a VERY LONG WAY to go (obviously) to demonstrate better than human driving behavior, but they are showing that their AVs are better-than-humans on certain high-risk (potential) collisions.

As somebody remarked, the last 1% takes 90% of time/effort. That's where we are...

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[1] https://waymo.com/safety/research

[2] https://waymo.com/research/comparison-of-waymo-rider-only-cr...

[3] https://waymo.com/research/do-autonomous-vehicles-outperform...

[4] https://waymo.com/research/comparison-of-waymo-rider-only-cr...

[5] https://waymo.com/research/comparative-safety-performance-of...

[6] https://waymo.com/blog/2022/09/benchmarking-av-safety/

[edit: reference]