Cruise, Waymo, Apple: Which self-driving cars crash the most?

An Uber driverless Ford Fusion drives down Small man Street on September, 22, 2016 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

• Cruise self-driving cars have been involved in more crashes than any other company.
• Waymo, on the other hand, has had a higher percentage of its fleets involved in accidents — likely due to the more testing miles under its belt. 
• Tech.co compiled California DMV data to see where, when, and which companies were involved in self-driving crashes. 

Self-driving cars will be safer than our current roads, experts say. But until we get to full autonomy, there have been — and will likely continue to be — some speed bumps.

Because the technology is so new, self-driving car accidents tend to get a lot of attention. Cruise’s 52 crashes, for example, pale in comparison to the 3,564 traffic deaths in California last year alone. Still, the incidents are top of mind for other drivers on the road — as well as for competing companies, which have a knack for secrecy.

Tech news and review site Tech.co combed through the California Department of Motor Vehicle data to quantify and locate each individual self-driving car crash in the state, including which company’s vehicles were involved.

“There’s no progress without pain,” Tom Fogden, who lead the research for Tech.co, said. “Our research shows that Californians, especially those in San Francisco are bearing the brunt of the change to self-driving vehicles, hopefully, it will all be worth it.”

It’s important to consider miles traveled when evaluating the findings. Waymo, for example, has now logged more than 10 million miles of self-driving tests — well above that of any competitors. Tech.co‘s data does not include crash rates per miles driven, only per vehicles in the fleet, an important distinction.

Cruise, by comparison, had only logged about 131,000 miles on California roads between December 2016 and 2017, according to its most recent state filing. In that same time period, Waymo logged 350,000, Ars Technica reported. 

Waymo declined to comment, while Cruise did not respond to a request from Business Insider. 

In some cases, it was a human driver at fault for a collision — including times when the computer would have made a safer decision. 

General Motors / Cruise

% of fleet that’s crashed: 30%

Total number of crashes: 52

“With the highest number of accidents in the study, multinational car manufacturer, General Motors’ ‘Cruise’ cars have a blighted record when it comes to driverless car testing,” says tech.co. “Despite being the largest car manufacturer in the US, with over 100 years’ experience in making vehicles, the company has failed to make a smooth transition into the driverless
car market, with nearly 30% of their self-driving fleet suffering collisions.”

Source: Tech.co 

Waymo

% of fleet that’s crashed: 41%

Total number of crashes: 36

“Despite Google’s seemingly endless knowledge and power, the company’s self-driving car fleet has the highest collision rate in the study,” writes Tech.co. “Google’s autonomous vehicles have crashed 36 times in the Mountain View area, seemingly unable to deal with the six-lane El Camino Real (The King’s Highway), which snakes through the area.”

Source: Tech.co