A two-car crash involving a Waymo robotaxi in the Pico-Union neighbourhood of Los Angeles left a woman critically injured on Sunday morning.
According to the Los Angeles police, the collision was reported at 5:44 a.m. in the 1000 block of Venice Boulevard, two blocks north of the 10 Freeway.
A woman was rushed to hospital in critical condition, and four other people who complained of pain were treated at the scene, local media outlet ABC7 reported.
According to Waymo, a car travelling on Venice Boulevard struck a pedestrian pushing a cart across the street before swerving into the opposite lane and hitting the autonomous vehicle.
“The safety of our riders and other road users is our top priority,” a spokesperson said in a statement provided to local media outlet ABC7. “We are coordinating with first responders and are grateful for their quick response.”
Based on that account, the driverless car was not the striking vehicle. Police have not publicly attributed fault, and the cause remains under investigation.
IIHS Study
The accident happened just days after an independent study found the Alphabet subsidiary’s driverless fleet recorded 68% fewer police-reportable crashes per mile than human drivers.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IHSS) published a 25-page study last Thursday that gave Waymo its strongest independent safety endorsement to date — and simultaneously warned that the national data system tracking autonomous vehicles is not fit for large-scale monitoring.
Researchers analysed Level 4 autonomous vehicle crashes reported between 2021 and 2024 across San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin, comparing Waymo‘s driverless fleet with conventional human-driven vehicles in the same cities and years.
Waymo‘s robotaxis recorded 68% fewer police-reportable crash involvements per vehicle mile travelled.
Rear-end collisions where a Waymo struck another car were 91% less frequent, crashes where a Waymo was rear-ended fell 40%, injury crashes dropped 81% per mile and single-vehicle crashes were 85% lower.
Only 22% of the 736 public-road crashes in which automation was engaged were deemed police-reportable, the researchers estimated.
Two thirds occurred during fully driverless operation. Level 4 vehicles were unlikely to be the striking vehicle or primary contributor.
Crash-rate reductions varied by city — 76% in Phoenix, 71% in Los Angeles, 35% in San Francisco.
Austin was an outlier at 4% higher than human drivers, which IIHS attributed to small sample sizes.
The study recommended requiring standardised vehicle miles travelled reporting from all operators, eliminating duplicate crash reports, adopting standardised crash classifications, clearly identifying operating mode at the time of a crash and reducing reliance on manually coded crash narratives.
IIHS President David Harkey said the data collection system is insufficient for monitoring a large-scale expansion of driverless fleets.
Lead researcher Eric Teoh cautioned that findings are limited to Waymo‘s current technology and operating areas.
“If they move on to new cities with different weather and traffic conditions and all that, we are not sure,” Teoh said.
Waymo said the IIHS data validated its own earlier analysis of 56.7 million fully autonomous miles, which showed 79% fewer injury crashes compared with human drivers.
The study covered approximately 50 million Waymo driverless miles against roughly 222 billion driven by humans in the same cities.
Remote Operators
Safety claims have not shielded Waymo from operational scrutiny.
In February, Chief Safety Officer Mauricio Peña disclosed at a US Senate hearing that some remote operators who assist driverless vehicles in difficult scenarios are based in the Philippines.
Peña stressed that operators provide guidance but do not remotely drive the vehicles. Senators raised concerns about cybersecurity vulnerabilities and the qualifications of overseas staff, and criticised the labour implications of moving support roles abroad while autonomous vehicles displace US rideshare drivers.
Growing Regulatory Scrutiny
The Pico-Union crash extends a pattern of regulatory attention for Waymo.
In January, the National Transportation Safety Board opened an investigation into a crash between a Waymo robotaxi and a child near a Santa Monica elementary school during drop-off hours.
Waymo said the car braked from roughly 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact and argued a human driver would have struck the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.
The company has issued two software recalls since May — one affecting 3,791 vehicles over a defect that allowed robotaxis to drive onto flooded roads, another covering 3,871 vehicles over a bug that let cars enter closed freeway construction zones.
Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana has called for federal regulators to establish a national standard requiring autonomous vehicle developers to demonstrate safety.
At the same time, co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov separately aimed indirect criticism at Tesla over a lack of transparency on safety data.
Safety as Sole Constraint on Expansion
Rival Tesla has been expanding its robotaxi service across seven US metros, including Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, Tampa and the San Francisco Bay Area.
On its second-quarter earnings call last week, Elon Musk called safety “the sole constraint on our expansion” and set a target of zero injuries from the fleet.
Musk argued that 30,000 to 40,000 annual US road deaths rarely make headlines while a single robotaxi injury would draw global attention and regulatory tightening.
Tesla‘s Q2 shareholder deck showed cumulative paid robotaxi miles reaching roughly 2.4 million by June, however monthly additions fell from an estimated 440,000 in March to roughly 140,000 in June — a quarter-on-quarter decline of approximately one-third.
The company presented the series only in cumulative form, a format that rises by construction and obscures the sequential slowdown.
Tesla has logged roughly 380,000 total unsupervised robotaxi miles as of last week, a fraction of Waymo‘s 50-million-mile driverless dataset and too small a sample to appear in the IIHS study’s 2021–2024 window.
Musk also said this month that delaying FSD approval in France would cost lives, responding to French Transport Minister Philippe Tabarot, who cited the system’s ability to exceed speed limits and gaps in driver-attention monitoring as grounds for withholding authorisation.
Congress is considering legislation to create uniform federal safety regulations for self-driving vehicles, a process that brought executives from both companies before a Senate committee earlier this year.
