Waymo Is Watching Everything And That Data Could Win Your Injury Case

You may have spotted one. Since September 2025, Waymo Google's autonomous vehicle division has been mapping Denver roads with a fleet of self-driving test vehicles, with full public robo-taxi service expected to launch in 2026.

For most Denverites, the reaction is curiosity. For personal injury attorneys, the reaction is something else: a recognition that a new and legally complex era of car accident claims is arriving in Colorado.

Here's what you need to understand right now, before you ever set foot near one of these vehicles: every Waymo car is a rolling data center. Every second it operates, it records an extraordinary volume of information about what it saw, what it decided, and exactly what it did. If one of these vehicles is involved in a crash that injures you, that data could be the most powerful evidence in your case but only if someone acts quickly enough to preserve it.

What Waymo Vehicles Are Recording Right Now on Denver Streets

Waymo's fleet in Denver uses what the company calls its 5th and 6th generation autonomous systems, deployed across Jaguar I-PACE and Zeekr RT vehicles. Each car operates using a sensor suite that includes:

• 360-degree cameras capturing a continuous visual record of the vehicle's surroundings

• LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) laser-based sensors that build a real-time 3D map of everything around the vehicle

• Radar for detecting the speed and distance of nearby objects in all weather conditions

• Onboard AI decision logs that record every driving decision the system made: when it braked, how fast it was going, what objects it detected, and how it classified them

This isn't a dashcam. It's a complete, timestamped record of exactly what the vehicle perceived and exactly how it responded second by second. In a traditional car accident, your attorney pieces together the story from police reports, skid marks, witness accounts, and surveillance video. In a Waymo accident, the vehicle itself was recording the entire event in far more detail than any human witness could.

That level of documentation is unprecedented in personal injury law. And it changes everything about how these cases are built.

The Catch: That Data Belongs to Waymo

Here's where things get complicated for injured Coloradans.

All of that sensor data, camera footage, LiDAR point cloud data, and decision-making logs are the property of Waymo. The company does not hand it over voluntarily. Attorneys who handle these cases nationally report that accessing this evidence requires formal legal action preservation demands, subpoenas, and in some cases, litigation over the company's attempts to shield internal data behind claims of proprietary confidentiality.

Waymo has previously sued the California DMV in an effort to keep certain collision records from public disclosure. That tells you something about how aggressively the company guards its data.

In Colorado, there is no specific statute mandating how long autonomous vehicle companies must retain crash data. Under Colorado civil procedure rules and established state case law, a company has a duty to preserve relevant evidence once litigation is reasonably foreseeable but that duty doesn't trigger itself. Someone has to act first.

If you wait too long after a crash days, even hours in some scenarios critical data may be overwritten, purged under routine data retention schedules, or made significantly harder to obtain. The window to preserve this evidence can be very short.

Colorado's Autonomous Vehicle Law Has a Significant Gap

In 2017, Colorado passed Senate Bill 17-213, which authorized fully autonomous vehicles to operate on Colorado roads as long as they comply with state and federal driving laws. Colorado was among the first states to take this step, and the law made Colorado one of the most permissive states in the country for AV deployment.

The law does include one provision relevant to crashes: if an autonomous vehicle violates a traffic law during an incident, that violation is attributed to the autonomous system not a human operator. That's meaningful. But the law does not resolve the harder question: when you're injured, who exactly do you sue, and for what?

Colorado SB17-213 does not specifically address liability between the autonomous vehicle manufacturer, the software developer, and any injured third party. That legal gap exists right now, just as Waymo is preparing to put paying passengers into driverless cars on Denver streets.

The framework is being written through litigation as this technology rolls out. The early cases in other states are establishing precedents that Colorado courts will eventually follow. A 2025 jury verdict found Tesla partially responsible for a fatal crash involving its Autopilot system and delivered a $329 million award. GM's Cruise robo-taxi division settled a case for a reported $8 to $12 million after one of its vehicles dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco. These numbers reflect the fact that when a technology company is the defendant, the case has more in common with a product liability lawsuit than a standard car accident claim.

Who Can Actually Be Held Responsible in a Denver Waymo Crash?

In a conventional accident, fault flows from driver behavior. One driver ran a light. The other failed to yield. Colorado's comparative fault rules sort out the percentages and determine who owes what.

When a driverless vehicle is involved, multiple parties can potentially bear responsibility depending on what caused the crash:

Waymo itself as the operator and developer of the autonomous system may be liable if the vehicle's software, sensors, or AI decision-making contributed to the crash. This can be pursued under both negligence and product liability theories. Unlike a standard car accident, product liability allows you to hold a company responsible for a defective product without having to prove it acted recklessly only that the product failed to perform as a reasonable person would expect.

Component manufacturers may be liable if a specific hardware failure a malfunctioning LiDAR unit, a defective camera, a braking system failure caused or contributed to the crash.

A human driver in another vehicle may still bear fault if their negligence caused the collision, even if a Waymo was involved. Colorado's comparative fault rules apply here exactly as they would in any other accident.

The complexity of sorting this out and the resources Waymo's parent company Alphabet can direct at defending claims makes having an experienced trial attorney in your corner early in the process critically important.

What to Do If You're Involved in a Crash with a Waymo in Colorado

The steps immediately after any accident still apply: call 911, get medical attention, document the scene with photos and video, and get contact information from any witnesses.

But with a Waymo accident, two additional actions are essential:

1. Request a preservation demand immediately. Your attorney should send a formal legal demand to Waymo requiring the company to preserve all sensor data, camera footage, LiDAR records, decision logs, and system status data from the vehicle at the time of the crash. This is time-sensitive.

2. Contact a trial-ready personal injury attorney before talking to anyone from Waymo or its insurers. These cases are technically complex and involve a corporation with enormous legal resources. A preservation demand, proper evidence collection, and an understanding of how to pursue both negligence and product liability theories simultaneously can make the difference between a fair outcome and getting nothing.

At Anderson Hemmat, our attorneys have spent more than 30 years building serious personal injury cases against well-funded defendants across Colorado. We know how to fight for the full value of your claim and we are not afraid to take a case to trial when the other side won't offer what our clients deserve. Call us at 303-782-9999 for a free case evaluation. You pay nothing unless we win.

The Bottom Line for Denver Drivers and Pedestrians

Waymo's arrival in Denver is genuinely interesting technology. The company's own data suggests its vehicles cause fewer crashes per mile than human drivers in the cities where it currently operates. But "fewer crashes" is not "no crashes." NHTSA records show that between July 2021 and November 2025, there were 1,429 reported incidents involving Waymo vehicles, resulting in 117 injuries and 2 fatalities. The company has issued four software recalls since 2024.

As Waymo scales toward full public service in Denver in 2026, Colorado residents will be sharing roads with vehicles that are legally, financially, and technically unlike anything personal injury law has had to deal with before.

The data those vehicles carry could be the most complete accident record ever created. But it belongs to a trillion-dollar technology company that has demonstrated it will protect that data aggressively.

If you're hurt, you need someone who moves faster than their legal team. Contact Anderson Hemmat for a free consultation 24/7 by phone, text, or email.