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Waymo reported 9.4 crashes in Los Angeles County for every million miles its driverless cars drove from October 2024 through June 2025. In the year after that the figure was 5.5, a drop of 41%, by the company’s own published numbers. The Los Angeles Times reported this month that the rate had fallen from about 57 per million miles in 2023 to fewer than six this year.
All of that drop is in minor crashes, and in the middle of it federal regulators changed which minor crashes companies have to report. Since June 16, 2025, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s crash-reporting order hasn’t required a company running driverless cars to report a crash where another vehicle hits its car, as long as nothing is towed, no one goes to a hospital, no air bag goes off and the damage isn’t expected to top $1,000. NHTSA wrote in May that those limits were designed to filter out many crashes where the driverless car “was stationary and was struck by another vehicle.”
Waymo sends NHTSA two kinds of crash reports. Crashes with a tow, a hospital trip, an air bag, a death or a pedestrian or cyclist struck have to be reported within days, and the 2025 change didn’t touch those. Minor crashes go in a monthly report. In Los Angeles, minor crashes fell from 6.5 per million miles before the change to 2.1 after it, while the ones reported within days went from 2.8 per million miles to 3.4.
Minor crashes were already falling before the rule, from 8.7 per million miles at the end of 2024 to 5.4 in the spring of 2025, and they fell to 2.1 in the first full quarter under it. They’ve stayed between 1.9 and 2.5 since. Most of the fall is in crashes where another vehicle hit the Waymo, which went from 5.2 per million miles to 1.8. Minor crashes of other kinds, which still have to be reported, fell too, though there were only 19 of them before the change and 14 after.
The reports Waymo files within days are mostly about tows, and the car being towed is usually the Waymo. Since the change, the Waymo was the only vehicle towed and no one was hurt in 109 of the 172 crashes reported within days, up from 20 of 41 before it. Three of those were Waymos scraping their undersides turning into the same parking lot on Beachwood Drive in Hollywood this spring. Crashes where someone reported an injury went from 1.1 per million miles to 0.8, but that’s 16 crashes before the change and 40 after, too few to read much into.
In 269 of the 440 crashes on Waymo’s list for the county, the Waymo was stopped or parked, by its own account. Other drivers rear-ended a stopped Waymo 123 times and sideswiped one 71 times. The company labels 62 of its LA crashes head-on, but the Waymo was standing still in 60 of them, and most of its descriptions of those crashes are of an oncoming car passing a Waymo that had stopped to let it through, often on a narrow street.
Of the 58 crashes on the list where someone reported an injury, Waymo’s descriptions say a passenger in the Waymo reported or alleged one in 39. None involved a suspected serious injury or a death.
Few of the crashes where no one was hurt have a police report. Waymo’s list notes whether one exists, and in the city of Los Angeles there’s a report for 23 of the 304 Waymo crashes where no one was hurt, about 8%. Santa Monica police wrote up none of 22. LAPD’s collision file on the city’s open data portal hasn’t added a crash since March 8, 2025, and the state’s autonomous vehicle crash dashboard, built at UC Berkeley, is made from the same federal reports, so it’s missing the same crashes.
Waymo’s crashes are thickest in Mid-City, Hollywood, West LA and Downtown, and along the east-west boulevards. Santa Monica Boulevard had 27 on it or at one of its corners, Olympic had 25 and Venice had 20.
NHTSA renewed the order in May and kept the reporting rules as they are. It said reports of fender benders with minor damage are less likely to give it information it can act on, and that the order isn’t meant for apples-to-apples comparisons of driverless technology.
Method. Crashes are Waymo’s published list of crashes with no one at the wheel, joined to its NHTSA reports. A crash counts as minor if Waymo first reported it in a monthly report. Miles come from Waymo’s quarterly data releases, September 2024 to June 2026, which counted Los Angeles by depot until December 2025 and by county after. Crash types, and whether another vehicle hit the Waymo, are basin.la’s reading of Waymo’s descriptions. The code is in tools/waymo/.