Are self-driving cars already safer than human drivers?

August was an eventful month for driverless taxis in San Francisco. On August 10, the California Public Utilities Commission voted to allow Google’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise to begin charging customers for driverless taxi rides across the city. A week later, Cruise vehicles were involved in two serious crashes within hours of one another. The next day, the California Department of Motor Vehicles demanded that Cruise cut its driverless taxi fleet in half while these crashes were investigated.

A few days later, New York Times reporter Cade Metz appeared on the Times’s flagship podcast, The Daily, to discuss these developments and the state of the self-driving industry.

Metz argued that in recent weeks, it has become “more and more clear to the people riding the cars, and to other citizens in the city, that they are flawed, that they do make mistakes, that they can gum up traffic, that they can cause accidents.”