to the general public in Phoenix. Right now members of the public are hailing vehicles with no human driver controlling the car – either in the vehicle or remotely – to help them get to where they’re going as part of their everyday lives.
This milestone is not just the output of many years’ experience in developing the Waymo Driver – it’s also the result of over a decade developing our safety practices. Since we started in 2009 as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, we’ve spent years refining a comprehensive set of robust methodologies that assess safety across our technology, operations, and team culture, and ultimately guide the deployment and safe operations of the Waymo Driver.
We want to give everyone who rides with the Waymo Driver a deeper understanding of the incredibly high standards to which we hold ourselves in the safety practices that govern our deployments. Today, we’re publishing two papers that explain the processes we use to drive fully autonomously on public roads and validate the safety of our operations.
The first, Waymo’s Safety Methodologies and Safety Readiness Determinations, includes details of our Safety Framework – the careful and multilayered approach to safety that has helped make it possible to deploy fully autonomous vehicles on public roads.
The second, Waymo’s Public Road Safety Performance Data, analyzes the miles we’ve driven on public roads in Arizona – one of 10 states we’ve driven in the U.S. since our founding – to provide data about our safe operations in practice.
This is the first time an autonomous technology company has released a framework describing the safety of its fully autonomous commercial operations. We believe this transparency and accountability is important for demonstrating the trustworthiness of our operations, and critical to deepen the dialogue around autonomous driving safety. We look forward to ongoing engagement with experts and academia to help ensure our work can continue to evolve and grow.
Waymo’s Safety Framework: Safety Methodologies and Safety Readiness Determinations
There is currently no universally accepted approach for evaluating the safety of autonomous vehicles – despite the efforts of policymakers, researchers and companies building fully autonomous technologies. Since we began our work in 2009, we have worked to develop a robust Safety Framework – with multiple complementary methodologies – that embeds safety in all aspects of our technological and product development. This framework draws on insights from the research and automotive communities, and is based on our extensive experience in building autonomous systems.
By publishing our framework, we aim to transparently share details about our approach; show how we evaluate our safety performance; demonstrate how we understand and measure our readiness for safe autonomous operations at scale; and invite perspectives from experts as we continue to expand our operations.
As our industry progresses, we encourage other autonomous driving companies to develop and publish guiding frameworks and principles that can demonstrate how autonomous systems are safely and responsibly deployed.
Our Safety Framework, available here, maps out our approach to safety in three fundamental layers: