Waymo sues California DMV to keep driverless crash data under wraps

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge

The California Department of Motor Vehicles was sued by the company to keep crash data private. The operator of the vehicle is owned by the parent company of the internet giant. The LA Times reported the news of the lawsuit.

Over 60 companies are allowed to operate test vehicles on public roads in California. Only a few are approved to fully operate autonomously without safety drivers at the wheel, and even fewer have been approved to deploy vehicles for commercial purposes.

The company wants to keep private information about how it handles certain emergencies, how it responds when its vehicles attempt to drive somewhere they are not intended to go, and how they handle steep hills or tight curves. In San Francisco, where it is permitted to operate fully self-driving cars without safety drivers, the company is testing some of its vehicles.

According to the lawsuit, releasing this information to the public would put the company at a competitive disadvantage.

The complaint was filed by ahawkins8223 on Scribd.

Making public the process by which Waymo analyzes crashes could provide strategic insight to Waymo's competitors and third parties regarding the assessment of those crashes.

It could have a chilling effect on the entire industry.

The suit stems from a public records request to the Department of Motor Vehicles from an unidentified party. Before complying with the request, the Department of Motor Vehicles allowed Waymo to redact certain details. The person who challenged the redactions was advised by the Department of Motor Vehicles to file a lawsuit to block the challenge.

Nicholas Smith, a spokesman for the company, said that every company has an obligation to demonstrate the safety of its technology.

A person from the Department of Motor Vehicles declined to comment on active litigation.

The number of miles driven and the number of times human safety drivers were forced to take control of their vehicles are required by companies that operate autonomously in California every year. The companies have been critical of this process, describing the reports as a useless way to track progress in the state.

Most firms keep a tight lid on important metrics and only demonstrate their technology under the most controlled settings.

Waymo has been more willing to share data than most other companies. In 2020, the company published 6.1 million miles of driving data from its test fleet in Arizona. Over the course of nearly a decade, the company used dozens of real-world fatal crashes in Arizona to demonstrate how its vehicles could have prevented them.