Safe to Deploy: How We Know The Waymo Driver Is Ready For The Road

The Waymo Driver is constantly learning, becoming smarter, more capable, and expanding into new environments. Before any major advancement — whether deploying safety-relevant software updates, expanding operations into brand new areas, or introducing a new vehicle platform — we apply the same rigorous, evidence-based analysis that we used to determine the Waymo Driver’s initial readiness. 

Our latest paper reveals the twelve acceptance criteria that we use to assess whether the Waymo Driver is ready for the road prior to deployment in such evolving circumstances. It also describes the governance structure that guides our decision-making and ensures accountability at every step. 

This is the first time any autonomous vehicle (AV) company has publicly shared this level of detail regarding its safety processes — and we’re proud to continue to set a high bar for safety transparency.

Absence of Unreasonable Risk

Consistent with our prior work, this new paper further elaborates on the concept of absence of unreasonable risk — the current definition of safety across both industry and regulation. To ensure the absence of unreasonable risk,  Waymo uses a variety of tools – including our Safety Framework, Safety Case and Safety Impact data.

Waymo’s Safety Framework, which we publicly released in 2020 ahead of launching our fully autonomous service in Metro Phoenix (AZ), details how Waymo approaches safety on a daily basis, inclusive of its mission, principles, methodology and governance. The Safety Case documents and pressure-tests that the Framework fulfills its function credibly. Both tools share common readiness criteria, which are presented here for the first time with a more explicit overview of how we determine readiness predictively, ahead of deployment. Finally, Safety Impact and the continuous analysis of post-deployment performance data validate that our predictions manifest the desired outcomes in real life. 

When building the Waymo Driver, we need confidence in its ability to handle rare, high-risk scenarios — and in our ability to identify and mitigate those risks before deployment. We need to ask whether the residual risk posed by a system is acceptably low — not just in theory, but in practice. This determination is complex, multi-layered, and must be grounded in evidence. 

However, there is currently no consensus across the industry for how AV companies should build the case to determine readiness for deployment. Our hope is that by sharing our approach, we can help guide broader industry practices and regulatory frameworks, and offer a concrete, proven model for how companies should operationalize the concept of “absence of unreasonable risk.” 

Our Criteria for Determining Absence of Unreasonable Risk

In our approach, each of the twelve criteria plays a distinct role in helping us assess our safety readiness. Together, they help ensure that the Waymo Driver meets stated requirements, demonstrates strong performance catered to the use-case and deployment locations, mitigates known risks and has the monitoring systems in place to catch new ones. As no single metric or methodology can evaluate the AV safety on its own, this approach enables a more systematic and holistic analysis of residual risk, combining both qualitative and quantitative signals across multiple methods.

Each criterion statement guides deployment approval and feeds into the broader Safety Case, which includes additional process and performance evidence beyond deployment readiness. 

Of course, deployment in each geography exposes the Waymo Driver to new potential areas of uncertainty and risk. Our paper outlines the governance framework we have in place to develop a robust readiness determination, including the role our Safety Framework Steering Committee and Safety Board play, to ensure that residual risk remains in-line with pre-specified targets for the Waymo Driver in new risk environments.

Guiding Industry Standards for Readiness 

These criteria, and our governance structure, form the bridge between rigorous internal development and safe external deployment. They are already being used to support our real-world operations and will continue to evolve alongside our technology and service.

“This paper advances the conversation on how companies can credibly assess and demonstrate the safety of autonomous driving systems,” said Mauricio Peña, Chief Safety Officer at Waymo. “By being transparent about our process, we aim to support government officials and the public in understanding what ‘safe enough’ truly looks like for AV deployment.”

Autonomous driving is a complex, fast-moving field. But safety must always be the number one priority. By publishing our criteria, we hope to showcase both how we hold ourselves accountable — and help lay the foundation for safe, trusted, and widespread adoption of autonomous driving technology.

Read the full research paper here.