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Google's Self Driving Car Crashes
datapharmer writes "We've all read previous stories on slashdot about Google's driverless car, and some have even pondered if a crash would bring the end to robotic cars. For better or for worse, we will all find out soon, as the inevitable has occurred. The question remains, who is to blame. A Google spokesperson told Business Insider that 'Safety is our top priority. One of our goals is to prevent fender-benders like this one, which occurred while a person was manually driving the car.'"
"The door opened, you got in!"
The car crashed while being driven by a person.
Nothing to see here - move along please.
Relevant quote: "...occurred while a person was manually driving the car."
Headline should be: "Human damages Google car by operating it with his own slow, meaty appendages"
This crash occurred around the corner from my company's offices. I've seen that car in the fabrication shop across the street, so it's entirely possible that the vehicle had just been in for some repairs or modifications which could have triggered the accident.
Posting as AC to protect identity and such...
Why, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo! and may be Oracle too!
Why would one crash bring an end to robotic cars? Crashes can be expected while they are still developing this car.
..but not even reading the summary before being pushed to the front page?
I guess it is Friday afternoon, but still
any ways legal liability is a big hold up to auto cars and the only way that at least at the start to have them is to have auto drive only roads and even then there will need to be some kind of no fault or some one saying that all costs to fix things will be covered or there will need to be auto drive insurance. Also the cops and courts will need someone to take the fall if any laws are broke.
This brings a whole new and more significant meaning to the term "computer crash". "Yea my computer crashed yesterday, it was a real problem because it went right through someone's living room and I forgot to take a backup..."
Is it that slow of a news day that a car crash makes it to the front page?
My company home page
I've posted this before and I'll post it again.
Robot cars don't have to be 100% reliable. As long as they're more reliable than the jerks who normally scare the bejesus out of me by cutting across three lanes of traffic, driving 90 MPH, weaving in and out, running red lights, etc., then I'm all for a robot car-driven society. I'm willing to put up with the computer glitches that, on very rare occasions, cause crashes if I don't have to put up with the human glitches that call themselves licensed drivers.
Does this mean that the car works better without humans? The "every small" sample size study says yes!
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
ah the computer will take care of it, I have rear view tv why should I bother turning my hea..bump
I like safety but I cant expect humons to do anything right as a whole, a great example would be a coworker of mine, focused so hard on his little tv screen he didn't notice me standing inches away from the side of his car as he backed out, I knocked on his window, throughly scaring him and pointed to my eyes.
FTA: Google's Prius struck another Prius, which then struck her Honda Accord that her brother was driving. That Accord then struck another Honda Accord, and the second Accord hit a separate, non-Google-owned Prius.
Man Crashes Car? That's no story. CAR CRASHES MAN!!! Now *that's* a story.
I mean here the car is, a brain the size of a planet, and all we are asking it to do is to drive us around. I think it was attempted suicide.
The author of the Business Insider article seems to think that a 'driverless car' killed his mother or something. Every sentence was a scathing attack on the audacity of Google to even be running these tests. He also never once entertains the idea that this might have been a normal fender-bender between normally driven vehicles. He just assumes Google's responses are bald-faced lies and implies what really happened is that the computer decided to try to kill everyone else on the road.
What I don't get is why does he hate the car so much? It thought these cars were an exciting new technology. Why would he go out of his way to demonize it?
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
There are examples where a single story is given credit for putting an end to something.
Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion car http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_car was abandoned by its investors after a single accident. A closer examination shows that the bankers were already getting skittish. The car didn't offer sufficient advantages to offset its perceived problems.
The Hindenburg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster accident is said to have ended the age of lighter than air ships. Again, a closer examination shows a whole bunch of other factors made airships uneconomical, especially when airplanes were becoming more and more competitive with each passing year.
I can't think of any examples where something with real advantages was killed off by a single incident.
After reading this article and seeing the pictures, I'm buying a Prius!
Striking a car with enough force to trigger a four-car chain reaction suggests the Google car was moving at a decent clip
It caused all that carnage and I can't even see a scratch on the Google Prius or the Prius in front of it!
Anyone who doesn't think we're going to see crashes with a new (semi)autonomous driving system is delusional or being obtuse. If one crash becomes some sensational national news story, one has to wonder why.
There's an inherent conflict between the prime directive of the Google auto-driving software ("drive safely"), and the prime directive of the Toyota firmware ("drive safely until the human isn't paying attention, then accelerate to top speed for as long as possible").
It was only a matter of time before the Toyota side of the car's character came to the fore. ;^)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
car crashes you!
Commercial aircraft are largely automated fly-by-wire systems. Every so often, there's a crash caused in part by sensor malfunction. Does the NTSB and FAA prohibit use of autopilot as a result?
Humans crash cars on the road and kill each other all the time. So that means we should outlaw human-controlled driving mechanisms, of course.
Some men are sexual predators and have abused children. That means we have to physically quarantine all men from all children, right?
If your standard for progress is perfection, then I've got some bad news for you.
Google's Self Driving Car Crashes
Ah, so in other words it drives like the average American driver... Good to know. Now it's truely ready for the main stream.
The article neglects to mention the google-car's previous DUI. Influence of.....?
Gently reply
Although we like to think all accidents are preventable (and in theory, they are), that theory changes a bit when you claim that all accidents are preventable when only one driver is attempting to prevent them. Now, I'm sure this happened under a typical, well controlled situation (stopped cars in the middle of the street, for instance), something that happens quite regularly on any drive, and therefore a very typical obstacle. However, consider that there has to be SOME condition for which lesser of evil choices might have to be made. If I, as a regular human driver, are driving down a residential street and a child jumps out in front of me at the last second, and I don't have time to stop, but I DO have time to swerve, but swerving means I will hit another car/tree/mailbox/etc, the non-living, inanimate object is going to have a really bad day.
As I said, I'm sure the google car crashed for much less sensational reasons. Either it was a bug in the software, or a human really had full control of the vehicle and it's not a software/hardware issue at all. Still, I can foresee a decision tree that allows for the decision to hit another vehicle to avoid hitting a person. I've brought up this issue before in fact, in the case that AI, as good as it might be, will have difficulty determining the difference between a small child, a dog, and a fire hydrant standing at the edge of the street. A human, when approaching either the child or dog will pay attention and adjust speed and passing distance to ensure that should a last second "dart out into traffic" moment occur, appropriate action can be taken to avoid a tragic accident. Google's car won't have an easy way to know for sure if that fire hydrant is going to dart out into traffic or not, and without being absolutely sure will HAVE to slow down for each and every one of them, JUST IN CASE. That alone will do more to kill the program than any number of fender benders ever will.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
True, but in this case, this non-story is just a chance to let everybody bring in their Three Laws jokes.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Would it be accurate to say that only in California could a 5 car fender-bender involve three Priuses?
The car barely touched the other car, you can tell by the picture, there's no visible damage. Most likely just touched the bumper. It probably happens a couple of times a week. They are debugging, that's good, let them work in piece. How many car crashes are there every day around the world? And how many barely-touched-you incidents like this one? All they had to do was exchange insurance information. Instead, we could see a cop at the scene. Why? Probably because the other driver acted like an asshole, only because it was a Google car and not a regular car. So, shitload of people crash everyday, many while learning how to drive. What's the difference if it was a computer crashing? The difference is that the computer's learning can be replicated, while human's learning is harder to replicate. So let that fucking car crash as much as it needs in order to get really good at driving and STFU.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Except in Soviet Russia...
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
And the Wright brothers crashed planes...
The advent and adoption of the self driving car will prove to be the single most life saving accomplishment of this century. If the google car went rogue and ran over a group of school children and the steering column punctured straight through the torso of the meatbag driver, I would still champion the development of this project. The technology to achieve the goal of self driving cities and highways has already existed for years. Adequate support and testing is all that is needed to make this a reality. Unfortunately you or someone you love will likely be injured or killed in an automobile accident before self driving vehicles become widely adopted - any critics to projects like google's should bear this in mind.
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/., please find a good editor.
Both the HAL 9000 and SkyNet had perfect operational records right up until they, um, started having issues.
Maybe having a glitch early on is a good sign.
Why shouldn't a car driven by one crash as well? w00t!
Also worth noting: Thirty thousand people a year die in auto crashes. Could Google's robots do much worse?
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
ob XKCD
There's not enough info available about this yet.
I'd expect Google's driverless cars to have not only the Velodyne laser scanner and the vision system, but a dumb anti-collision radar system as a backup. We had one of those (an Eaton VORAD) on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, just in case the more advanced systems failed. So did most of the Grand Challenge teams, including Stanford. You can buy that as a factory option on some cars now.
So if they rear-ended another car, I'd suspect either manual driving or a low-level system failure.
holy crap, now i've seen and read it all..
Cars bumping into each other doesn't seem that dramatic to me. I thought that the only thing that could bring the end to robotic cars would be if one of them ran over a child?
Also, have they figured out the insurance question yet? Which automaker would want to sell those, if they have to pay in case of an accident?
If the google car crashed, do as I do, close all windows, turn it off, wait for a few seconds then turn it on again.. so simple...
that's what you get for closing google labs...
OR... the car had just been finished having maintenance work on it and the person was driving it back to the compound in order to have it examined in case said maintenance screwed with the software somehow.
Nobody cares what the CAPTCHA for your post was.
Like Tempest Keep?
Nobody cares what the CAPTCHA for your post was.
Not to mention the obvious jokes about the crash being a driver error.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's still in beta, it's bound to crash.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
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