A man who cannot drive says driverless cars cannot arrive soon enough
Lars Janssen has a visual condition that rules out a licence forever. New safety data from the US suggests the autonomous vehicles he is waiting for may already be safer than most human drivers.
Key points
- Lars Janssen, who has the visual condition nystagmus, says self-driving cars would give him independence he cannot get any other way.
- Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company within Alphabet, Google's parent, says its cars cause fewer injuries than human-driven ones.
- A July 2024 analysis by the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found Waymo vehicles had 68% fewer injury-causing crashes per mile than human drivers.
- That figure comes from Waymo's own operational data reviewed by the Institute, and covers only the conditions in which Waymo currently runs.
For Lars Janssen, the debate over self-driving cars isn't abstract at all. It's about whether he'll ever get somewhere under his own steam.
Janssen has nystagmus, a condition where the eyes move involuntarily and vision can't be corrected to the standard a driving licence requires. He'll never legally drive. Writing in response to a column in The Guardian that questioned who actually wants driverless vehicles, his answer was simple: he does.
What does the safety record actually show?
Waymo's cars had 68% fewer injury-causing crashes per mile than human drivers, according to a July 2024 analysis by the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an independent non-profit body that tests vehicle safety. That's a large gap.
Waymo operates a fully driverless taxi service, no human behind the wheel, in several US cities. The company is a separate business unit within Alphabet, the same parent that owns Google. We reported on 4 September that Waymo had just opened in San Diego, Tampa and Denver, and on 28 August that Munich is its first European target, with public rides planned for late 2027.
| Metric | Waymo | Human drivers |
|---|---|---|
| Injury crashes per mile | Baseline | 68% higher |
| Human in vehicle | No | Yes |
| Analysis date | July 2024 | July 2024 |
One caveat matters. The 68% figure covers only crashes that caused injuries, drawn from Waymo's fleet running mainly in mapped urban areas. The Institute reviewed the data independently, but the underlying mileage figures came from Waymo itself. The cars haven't been tested everywhere, in all weather, on all road types.
Janssen's broader point holds regardless. The column he responded to worried that reckless drivers give autonomous vehicles a bad name. His reply: the most careful driver on the road may turn out to be the one with no human behind the wheel.
What does this mean for people who cannot drive?
Roughly one in five people in the UK can't drive, whether due to age, disability, income levels or conditions like Janssen's. For them, autonomous vehicles aren't a convenience upgrade. They're a potential route to independence that better public transport alone doesn't replicate.
The technology isn't ready everywhere. Waymo operates in a handful of US cities and has no current UK service. Regulatory approval in Britain and most of Europe is years away. Anyone counting on self-driving cars for daily life should plan around that.
The safety data is moving in one direction, though. And for the people who need this technology most, Janssen included, that matters far more than whether the rest of us asked for it.
