Speeding Toward the Future — The robotaxi race is accelerating, but how safe are driverless cabs really?

February 23, 2026

California has led the charge in autonomous vehicle development and adoption – including robotaxi services, which have exploded over the last two years.

Waymo has the lion’s share of the U.S. market. After years of testing in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, Phoenix, AZ became Waymo’s first official market – but California is now its largest by far. As of summer 2025, out of Waymo’s 2500-vehicle fleet, over 800 autonomous vehicles were operating commercially across the San Francisco area, and approximately 700 in Los Angeles.

Although initially met with protests, and activists finding ways to thwart the cars on the roads, recent polls show that in San Francisco, public acceptance – enthusiasm, even – for driverless cabs has surged. Riders enjoy the privacy (no chatty or grouchy driver!), comfort (full climate control!), and amenities (choose your music, watch TV!) that robotaxis offer and are willing to pay a premium for them.

Early this month, Waymo announced that it had raised $16 billion in a recent fundraising round, which will be used to drive growth as the company expands services into a larger swath of California and over a dozen new cities globally.

Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, faces competition from Elon Musk’s Tesla and Amazon’s Zoox. (Cruise, by GM, briefly operated alongside Waymo in the Bay Area, but was suspended in 2023 due to safety problems.)

When Musk launched his Tesla robotaxi service in Austin late last spring, he boasted that the company could, in theory, put 10,000 on the road immediately. That proved to be premature: the first few cars quickly ran into trouble.

One attempted to run a railroad crossing signal as a train was approaching – it was only stopped by the safety observer. Viral videos showed one car braking mid-roadway for no apparent reason, one passing straight through a left-hand turn lane, briefly driving into oncoming traffic across the intersection, and one clearly exceeding the speed indicated by the posted 30 mph speed limit sign.

It’s worth noting that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has increased scrutiny of Tesla’s self-driving systems in general due to troubling collision data and safety concerns – Tesla has the highest crash rate of any automaker in the United States.

Even Waymo – which makes bold claims about its safety record – issued a voluntary recall in 2025 after numerous instances in which its cars drove past stopped school buses.

Last month, in an article for Bloomberg, David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, argued, “We don’t yet know whether a robotaxi trip is more or less likely to result in a crash than an equivalent one driven by a human. The answer likely depends on the trip and the autonomous vehicle company, and it might change in the future.”

Despite enormous enthusiasm for robotaxis in the media – and Waymo’s assertions that its autonomous cabs are “already improving road safety” and safer than human drivers – the experts Zipper consulted pointed to numerous variables and safety concerns. The data, they say, is promising but not conclusive. Some key takeaways:

• Because Waymo dominates the market, it’s primarily Waymo’s data being evaluated. Joseph Young, a spokesperson for the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, told Zipper, “There isn’t sufficient data available on Zoox’s or Tesla’s autonomous ride-hailing services to draw any conclusions.”
• Henry Liu, who leads MCity, the University of Michigan’s center for transportation technology and innovation, says he hasn’t “seen any unbiased, transparent analysis on autonomous vehicle safety. We don’t have the raw data.”
• Liu also pointed out that, because Waymo’s vehicles have so far driven primarily on relatively slow urban streets, it’s not a fair comparison to the enormous bulk of human driving taking place on faster highways.
• Waymo also uses human “teleoperators” — remote support from call centers — which are largely unregulated, may come from anywhere in the world, and whose type and extent of intervention are unknown.
• Frequent software updates mean that a software flaw could suddenly, markedly increase danger.
• Some experts argue that Waymo’s safety data analysis is skewed because it groups serious injuries and fatalities. Simply dividing Waymo’s total miles by total fatalities, they point out, reflects a higher per-mile death rate than the average with human drivers.
• There’s simply not enough data yet. Waymo will have to drive millions more miles before an accurate safety assessment can be made, researchers say.

Across California, there are approximately 1370 car accidents per day, resulting in over 500 injuries and nearly a dozen fatalities.

Even if they can be proven safer, would putting more robotaxis on the roads reduce serious accidents? Not necessarily, Zipper argues. If adding more robotaxis increases overall traffic on the streets – for example, if people choose autonomous cabs over (very safe) public transportation – we could see a net increase in crashes.

Who is responsible for a crash with a robotaxi?

Typical car accidents almost always involve human error, negligence, or recklessness. Autonomous vehicles are not operated by a human. Although not all accidents with a robotaxi are necessarily caused by (or entirely by) the robotaxi, driverless technology introduces a host of complex legal questions about what caused the accident and who is responsible. These issues often center on product liability – design, manufacturing, software engineering, programming, and so on.

Evidence and evidence collection differ in these cases. While regular car accident cases rely on physical damage, police reports, eyewitness accounts, and scene investigation, the onboard sensors and systems in autonomous vehicles record and log vast amounts of critical data. However, that data belongs to the company and can be challenging to access.

Given the rapid pace of technological development, the law continues to evolve. But if you are hurt in an accident involving a driverless cab, one thing remains the same: you have the right to seek compensation for your injuries and losses. It’s crucial to have the guidance not only of a skilled car accident attorney but also of a firm with experience in autonomous vehicle collisions, familiarity with the current legal frameworks, and access to a wide range of experts.

The Southern California personal injury lawyers at Aitken * Aitken * Cohn can help. For over four decades, our firm has been helping car accident victims win justice and compensation after serious motor vehicle accidents.

Some recent examples include AAC attorneys secured a $2.5 million settlement for a client in San Bernardino who was catastrophically injured in a highway collision. Our client was the rear driver’s-side passenger in a vehicle traveling northbound at a low rate of speed when it was struck from behind by a company-owned truck driven inattentively by the defendant driver. The impact forced the vehicle off the roadway, where it rolled multiple times down an embankment.

In a wrongful death matter, our firm obtained a $2.5 million settlement on behalf of a three-year-old boy who tragically lost his mother in a devastating head-on collision. The 26-year-old decedent was fatally injured on State Route 62 in San Bernardino County when a military service member, operating a Humvee as part of a convoy, crossed into oncoming traffic. The case was brought under the Federal Tort Claims Act and litigated in the United States District Court, Central District of California. Plaintiff contended the defendant driver fell asleep at the wheel, veering into the victim’s lane and causing the fatal crash.

Written on Behalf of Aitken * Aitken * Cohn