Car Crashes Are A Public Health Crisis. Autonomous Cars Are The Cure.

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Every year, nearly 40,000 Americans are killed in motor vehicle accidents. There are about 6 million collisions involving motor vehicles every year — about 16,500 per day — yet the carnage on America’s roads and highways goes largely unnoticed. Some are celebrating that in 2024, the number dead from car crashes in the US was less than 40,000. Whooppee! What a great time to be alive — as long as you are not one of the victims.

Jonathan Slotkin is a neurosurgeon, which means he is often called upon to treat the injuries sustained in one of those 6 million annual car crashes. When Waymo released a detailed report about the safely of its autonomous vehicles recently, Dr. Slotkin took the time to dig into the data. His study led to some interesting insights, which he shared in an opinion piece published by the New York Times on December 2, 2025.

The Waymo report contained data on nearly 100 million driverless miles in four American cities through June 2025, “the biggest trove of information released so far about safety,” Slotkin wrote. Compared to the experience of human drivers on the same roads, Waymo self-driving cars were involved in 91 percent fewer serious injury or fatal crashes and 80 percent fewer crashes causing any injury. “It showed a 96 percent lower rate of injury-causing crashes at intersections, which are some of the deadliest I encounter in the trauma bay,” Slotkin said.

His focus is on Waymo for one simple reason. It is the only autonomous car company in the US that issues clear and complete reports about the incidence of accidents involving its cars. So far, Tesla is doing everything possible to prevent the public — and regulators — from having a complete picture about its safety record. Instead, we are supposed to accept the assertions of a drug-addled chief executive who is on record as saying, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

Waymo Autonomous Driving Statistics Revealed

So far, other autonomous vehicle companies don’t release such data or provide only incomplete data. Waymo, by contrast, published everything Slotkin needed to analyze the data, including crash statistics with miles driven that allow accurate comparison to human drivers in the same locations. “If Waymo’s results are indicative of the broader future of autonomous vehicles, we may be on the path to eliminating traffic deaths as a leading cause of mortality in the United States. While many see this as a tech story, I view it as a public health breakthrough,” Slotkin wrote.

Autonomous vehicles are safer, he claimed, because they scrupulously follow specific rules, avoid distraction, see in all directions all the time, and prevent high speed conflicts, which will avoid most deadly collisions. Yet he acknowledges that they are not yet perfect, citing an instance of a Waymo passenger stuck inside a car that kept going around and around in a parking lot for about five minutes. As another example, Waymo had to roll out a software update last year when one of its cars struck a utility pole at low speed.

The Waymo data show its vehicles have been involved in two fatalities and one serious injury. “In all three cases … human-driven vehicles caused the collision — a high speed crash that pushed another car into a stopped Waymo, a red light runner hit a Waymo and other vehicles before striking and injuring a pedestrian, and a Waymo car was rear ended by a motorcyclist who was then fatally struck by a hit-and-run driver.”

Slotnik said there is an urban legend that autonomous vehicles brake erratically, which leads to them being rear ended frequently. The instances of phantom braking by Teslas operating in Autopilot or FSD mode may be responsible for that perception. In fact, Waymo vehicles are involved in far fewer rear end crashes that result in injuries than cars driven by humans. The data show that Waymo has never rear ended another vehicle hard enough to cause injury.

The Data Is Overwhelming

“In medical research, there’s a practice of ending a study early when the results are too striking to ignore. We stop when there is unexpected harm. We also stop for overwhelming benefit — when a treatment is working so well that it would be unethical to continue giving anyone a placebo. When an intervention works this clearly, you change what you do,” Slotkin wrote.

“There’s a public health imperative to quickly expand the adoption of autonomous vehicles. More than 39,000 Americans died in motor vehicle crashes last year, more than homicide, plane crashes, and natural disasters combined. Crashes are the No. 2 cause of death for children and young adults.

“But death is only part of the story. These crashes are also the leading cause of spinal cord injury. We surgeons see the aftermath of the 10,000 crash victims that come to emergency rooms every day. The combined economic and quality of life toll exceeds $1 trillion annually, more than the entire US military or Medicare budget.” Let that sink in for a moment. Motor vehicle accidents cause economic losses that exceed even the enormous US defense budget!

“This is not a call to replace every vehicle tomorrow,” Slotkin pointed out. “For one thing, self-driving technology is still expensive. Each [Waymo] car’s equipment costs $100,000 beyond the base price, and Waymo doesn’t yet sell cars for personal use. Even once that changes, many Americans love driving; some will resist any change that seems to alter that freedom.”

Of course, putting a label on a car that says “autonomous vehicle” is like putting a label on a can of spaghetti sauce that says, “All natural.” Maybe it is or maybe it is mostly marketing hype. “Many of the devastating crashes that capture headlines involve ‘driver assistance’ systems — the kind found in millions of Teslas and other modern cars — where humans need to remain vigilant behind the wheel,” Slotkin observed.

“Tesla recently released results suggesting that what it calls ‘full self-driving (supervised)’ decreases the frequency of crashes, but we will still need more independent analysis of that data before we can draw firm conclusions. And research on other partial automation vehicles have yielded mixed results. A study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found ‘no convincing evidence’ that partial automation reduces crash rates,” Slotkin explained.

“We don’t yet know if other autonomous vehicles will have a similar safety record [to Waymo]. Tesla recently launched a driverless pilot program (with a person supervising from the front passenger seat) in Austin, Texas, but has not released performance data yet. Other companies operate fully self-driving ride-hail services, but so far without comparable data transparency.

“There is likely to be some initial public trepidation. We do not need everyone to use self-driving cars to realize profound safety gains, however. If 30 percent of cars were fully automated, it might prevent 40 percent of crashes, as autonomous vehicles both avoid causing crashes and respond better when human drivers err. Insurance markets will accelerate this transition, as premiums start to favor autonomous vehicles.”

His observation about insurance rates is instructive. If indeed autonomous vehicles achieve significantly lower rates of injury and death, reduced insurance premiums will help offset the higher costs of the technology.

Show Us The Data!

According to the data released by Waymo, in comparison to an average human driver over an equal distance, Waymo vehicles had 96 percent fewer crashes at intersections, 92 percent fewer crashed involving pedestrians, 83 percent fewer crashes with motorcycles or bicycles, and 73 percent fewer so-called lateral crashes where the front of one car crashes into the side of another car. Those are remarkable statistics.

Slotkin argued that no matter how much safer autonomous vehicles are, “if they end up primarily pulling riders from trains and buses, which are already exceedingly safe, there will be far less of a benefit. It makes sense to deploy these vehicles through commercial robotaxis, which is the current approach, but we need deliberate workforce planning to address the way that this will threaten the livelihoods of America’s millions of commercial drivers.”

He added, “Rather than grapple with these challenges, many cities are erecting roadblocks. In Washington, D.C., local politicians have long postponed a key report that would facilitate the broader use of these vehicles despite 18 months of successful vehicle testing. In Boston, the City Council is considering mandating a ‘human safety operator’ in every vehicle, effectively stalling meaningful deployment. Policymakers need to stop fighting this transformation and start planning for it.”

The key, Slotkin said, is data. He noted that currently, companies are required to report crashes but not the number of miles driven between incidents. “We need the denominator, not just the numerator. Data reporting requirements should include crash rates, miles driven and where, and safety performance. Independent auditors should verify this data against police reports, insurance claims and privacy-protected medical records.

“This transformation will happen,” he says. “We can guide it toward a safer, more equitable future or let it unfold haphazardly around us. There’s a future where manual driving becomes uncommon, perhaps even quaint, like riding horses is today. It’s a future where we no longer accept thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of broken spines as the price of mobility. It’s time to stop treating this like a tech moonshot and start treating it like a public health intervention.” To which we say, “Bravo, Dr. Slotkin!”

Time For Tesla To Follow Waymo’s Lead

The elephant in the room, of course, is Tesla. So far, it has relied on marketing terms that many consider misleading while refusing to release the data needed to verify its claims. Efforts to contact the company are often met with a smiling pile of dung emoji. The company has vigorously opposed attempts by plaintiffs’ attorneys to pursue claims for damages in court.

As we have said frequently, Tesla and Elon Musk openly oppose providing the data that would verify the truth of their claims that their self-driving systems are safer than human drivers. Maybe they are, but we have no way of verifying that.

So, Elon, if you want people to pay thousands of dollars for your autonomous driving software, show us the proof. Give us the data the way Waymo did. Stop trying to game the system by forcing safety officials to weaken their investigations. Own up to your mistakes like adults, rather than trying to jam your technology down people’s throats based on fake videos and glowing statements during earnings calls.

Slotkin is correct that injuries and deaths from auto accidents are a public health concern, but we need to keep in mind that those autonomous cars are on public roads and that private citizens are unwitting participants in the development of those systems, even though they have not given their consent.

Secrecy and misleading claims are not helpful. Waymo has shown how its autonomous cars perform in the real world. Now it is time for all other companies promoting autonomous operation to come clean as well — particularly Tesla. C’mon, Elon. We double dog dare you to do the right thing!