GoKawiil“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” - Amara’s law
I can’t think of a better poster child for this principle than autonomous vehicles.
Back in 2017, when I started working in venture capital, AVs were one of the hottest themes in “tech”. Perhaps this had something to do with Elon Musk proclaiming in December 2015 that Tesla would deliver “full autonomy” within two years. (Musk has earned himself a reputation for repeatedly jumping the gun on this topic.) This frenzy was also fueled by Uber, which was flying high at the time, and talking a big game about self-driving cars. In any case, a substantial share of the tech community was convinced that AVs were right around the corner.
In hindsight, this level of excitement was clearly premature. Tech leaders were generally way too bullish about the prospect for AV commercialization in 2017, and 2018, and 2019 (and 2020, and 2021…) Yet, in the scheme of human history, it turns out that AVs were, in fact, approximately “right around the corner”. AVs are finally real now, and most people I know have not yet fully contended with the transformational potential of this technology.
That’s partially because of the way that Waymo, the leading American AV company, has rolled out its services: gradually, and then all at once… one city at a time. This initial approach to the market was driven by the need to train machine learning models on real city streets, and establish a track record of safety in order to earn public acceptance. If you haven’t spent time recently in either of the company’s launch markets — Phoenix or San Francisco — you may not be aware of just how rapidly Waymo has made progress towards both of those objectives.
[An update below with some fresh data on the adoption curve, courtesy of the California Public Utility Commission — and thanks to the inimitable Nat Bullard for producing and then directing my attention to this chart…]
This brings me to a December 2024 study spearheaded by Swiss RE, which analyzed safety data from 25.3 million autonomous vehicle rides by Waymo. This study compares the rate of accidents resulting in significant damage between Waymo’s autonomous vehicles and the “human-driven vehicle” (HDV) population — including an elite subset of HDVs utilizing the latest generation of semi-autonomous safety features.
The upshot? AVs are roughly ten times safer than human drivers, regardless of those extra features. It’s not even close.
The team at Waymo seems to believe that they have crossed the autonomy Rubicon. The company is expanding to more cities — Austin, Atlanta, and Miami — and appears to be ramping up production, as revealed by recent drone footage of the company’s factory in Arizona. There are over 2,000 vehicles mustered on this lot. That’s nearly three times as many vehicles as Waymo has deployed to date!
Source: “New Drone Footage of the Waymo Factory in Arizona”, Autonomy Central, Jan 2025.
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