PJ Vogt

But statistically speaking, that could still be a fluke.

Some academics have suggested we'd need about 300 million miles to have statistical confidence.

In the hundreds of millions of miles the Waymo driver has traveled, it was involved in two fatal crashes which it did not appear to cause.

Here are the details of those crashes.

In one, a speeding human driver rear-ended a line of vehicles at a stoplight.

There's an empty Waymo in the line of struck cars.

In another crash, a Waymo was yielding for a pedestrian.

It was rear-ended by a motorcycle.

The motorcycle driver was then struck by a second car.

That's everything.

When Timothy Beeley looks at the entire safety picture, the results we have so far from this big experiment Waymo is conducting on American roads, what he sees is mainly promising.

which doesn't mean we shouldn't scrutinize this Waymo experiment as it continues.

I find myself paying a lot of attention to Waymo crashes, which isn't hard.

They make headlines.

The most harrowing one recently was this January.

A child near an elementary school in Santa Monica is struck by a Waymo.

The company issued a statement.

Waymo said its driver had braked hard, reducing speed from 17 to under six miles per hour, a faster reaction, they claimed, than a human driver would have been capable of.

What happened next at the accident scene actually answers a question I'd had.

What does a Waymo do after a car crash, since there's no human driver to help?