Denver drivers have some new company on the road, and these vehicles don’t have anyone behind the wheel.
Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, began offering driverless rides in Denver on September 1. It’s the latest expansion of a technology that could fundamentally change how Americans get around. And while the idea of a car navigating Denver traffic without a human driver might make some people nervous, the safety data suggest we might be better off letting the computers drive.
Waymo’s initial Denver service area covers approximately 60 square miles, stretching from the University of Denver in the south to just below Thornton in the north, and from Sloan’s Lake in the west to Central Park in the east. The company plans to expand throughout the metro area, eventually including Denver International Airport.
Paying attention when drivers aren’t
Denver’s Waymo vehicles carry 13 exterior cameras, six radar sensors, and four light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors, giving them a 360-degree view of everything around the vehicle. The cameras identify pedestrians, cyclists, traffic signals, and lane markings up to roughly 300 yards away. LiDAR uses laser pulses to build a three-dimensional picture of the surroundings, and radar tracks how nearby objects are moving, even in conditions where cameras struggle to see. Artificial intelligence processes all of it in real time, anticipating what other drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists might do next.
A human driver is constantly checking mirrors, watching traffic lights, and guessing what the car in the next lane is about to do, assuming we’re paying attention at all. Waymo’s sensors watch everything at the same time. They don’t get distracted.
That doesn’t mean the technology is perfect. But it does eliminate some of the most common causes of human error.
Impressive safety stats
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 39,345 people died in traffic crashes in the United States in 2024. That’s more than 100 people every day.
We’ve spent decades trying to make driving safer through traffic laws, public education campaigns, and improvements in vehicle design. Autonomous vehicles offer something different. Instead of trying to make people better drivers, they remove the human driver altogether.
And so far, the results are encouraging.
According to Waymo’s published safety data, its vehicles traveled more than 271 million miles in fully autonomous operation through June 2026.
Compared with human drivers traveling similar distances in the same areas, Waymo reported 95% fewer crashes resulting in serious injury or worse, 82% fewer crashes involving reported injuries, and 82% fewer crashes resulting in airbag deployment.
The results involving pedestrians and cyclists are particularly striking. Waymo reported 93% fewer injury-causing crashes involving pedestrians and 86% fewer involving cyclists.
These are Waymo’s own figures, based on comparisons with human driving benchmarks, and they don’t guarantee the same results in every city or weather condition. Still, they’re difficult to dismiss.
Of course, autonomous vehicles will still be involved in accidents. No technology can eliminate every risk. But the question shouldn’t be whether a self-driving car can operate perfectly. It should be whether it can operate more safely than the average human driver.
The evidence so far suggests that it can.
Safety is more than avoiding accidents
There’s another advantage to driverless vehicles that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: reducing the risk of sexual assault by rideshare drivers.
Denver has seen multiple cases of rideshare drivers accused of sexually assaulting their passengers. In April 2026, a rideshare driver was arrested after allegedly sexually assaulting a woman and driving away with her after her boyfriend stepped out of the vehicle. In 2024, another Denver rideshare driver was charged with sexual assault and false imprisonment after allegedly groping a female passenger during a ride.
For women traveling alone, particularly late at night, getting into a stranger’s car can come with risks that have nothing to do with traffic accidents. An autonomous vehicle eliminates the possibility of being sexually assaulted by the person hired to drive it, because there is no driver. For passengers who have experienced harassment, unwanted advances, or worse during a rideshare trip, that alone could be a compelling reason to choose one.
Colorado should welcome the competition
While There are plenty of reasons to be excited about autonomous vehicles beyond safety, new technologies also tend to attract politicians who believe their job is to regulate every conceivable risk before consumers can decide whether a product is useful. And established competitors are often happy to help.
Before Waymo could carry a single paying passenger in Denver, two Colorado taxi companies asked the Public Utilities Commission to block part of its permit. Their complaint? That Waymo would get to compete without the regulatory burdens placed on large taxi companies. The PUC ultimately approved Waymo’s license, but the episode is a preview of the fights ahead.
When the answer to competition is asking regulators to slow down the newcomer rather than lighten their own load, consumers lose.
Colorado should resist that temptation.
Reasonable safety standards, transparent reporting, and accountability are certainly important when autonomous vehicles cause harm. But we shouldn’t burden the industry with unnecessary restrictions simply because the technology is unfamiliar or because established transportation providers don’t like the competition.
Consider how much automobile technology has improved over the past century. Seat belts, airbags, anti-lock brakes, and electronic stability control have all made driving safer. Autonomous driving is basically another step in that progression; except this time we’re attempting to prevent crashes rather than simply reduce the injuries they cause.
Consumers should be free to decide whether they trust the technology. Some people will be eager to climb into a driverless vehicle. Others will want to wait until the technology has a longer track record. And some will always prefer driving themselves.
That’s fine. Nobody needs to be forced into an autonomous vehicle for the technology to succeed.
The future is already here
There will undoubtedly be growing pains. Denver’s winter weather will test the technology, unusual traffic situations will present challenges, and the occasional malfunction will make headlines. Those incidents deserve scrutiny, but they should also be considered alongside the thousands of crashes caused by human drivers every year.
Autonomous vehicles don’t have to be perfect to make our roads safer. They just have to be better than us.
And with hundreds of millions of driverless miles already behind them, there’s good reason to believe they’re getting there.
Vanessa Rutledge is senior fellow in emerging technology at Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.
