Plenty of people remain spooked by autonomous vehicles, or AVs. Some experts and policymakers have cautioned that AVs won’t necessarily make roads safer. When it comes to partial or full autonomy, the picture isn’t entirely clear, in part because there aren’t enough self-driving cars to make meaningful apples-to-apples comparisons.

Yet mounting research suggests that self-driving cars crash significantly less often than people, and with far fewer injuries. Evidence also shows that advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and other building blocks of autonomy—some of which are already mandated on every new car—are also reducing occupant and pedestrian injuries and deaths, along with insurance claims.

On the ADAS front, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that automatic emergency braking (AEB) systems that recognize people in front of the car cut pedestrian crashes by 27 percent. Those AEB systems are mandated for all light vehicles in the U.S. by 2029, and more than 90 percent of new models already comply under a voluntary automakers’ agreement. A separate IIHS study found that automated braking greatly reduced rear-end crashes, by 50 percent, and their injuries by 56 percent. The Highway Loss Data Institute found that cars with AEB alone showed a 13 percent drop in property-damage claims. Cars that bundled ADAS features, including automatic braking for pedestrians, adaptive cruise control, and lane-departure warnings, saw claims reductions up to 39 percent.

Move to Level 4 autonomy, and Waymo says its robotaxis have now given 20 million paid rides over 220 million miles , the equivalent of 250 lifetimes of driving.

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