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Google's Self Driving Car Crashes

Posted by timothy on from the had-to-happen-one-day dept.

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.'"

34 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. Johnny Cab by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "The door opened, you got in!"

    1. Re:Johnny Cab by pinkj · · Score: 5, Funny

      I wish I had mod points.

      Johnnycab: The fare is 18 credits, please.
      [Quaid gets out]
      Douglas Quaid: Sue me, dickhead!
      [cab tries to run him down, crashes, and explodes]
      Johnnycab: We hope you enjoyed the ride!

  2. Summary is sensationalistic by ELitwin · · Score: 5, Informative

    The car crashed while being driven by a person.

    Nothing to see here - move along please.

    1. Re:Summary is sensationalistic by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 4, Funny

      The car crashed while being driven by a person.

      Maybe he was looking at the GPS and not paying attention to the road.

    2. Re:Summary is sensationalistic by Dice · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The car crashed while being driven by a person.

      According to a Google spokesperson. If I were in that car, and it crashed while the software was driving, I would claim that I had been driving it too. Any public crash that could be blamed on the software would put the project in serious jeopardy.

    3. Re:Summary is sensationalistic by 101010_or_0x2A · · Score: 4, Funny

      9/11 was an inside job because man never landed on the moon.

    4. Re:Summary is sensationalistic by del_diablo · · Score: 2

      Lets talk about something a bit more relevant.
      Basically a small issue is that bugs will occuere. If the cars AI actually crashed the car, ain't it actually a really good thing? I mean, the bug would otherwise have been present.
      And since it crashed, they can figure out WHY it crashed, and that means they can fix the bug.
      And the same thing applies to everything: While doing R&D you actually want a few of your products to break badly, so you can fix the fault that caused it.

    5. Re:Summary is sensationalistic by Bitsy+Boffin · · Score: 2

      The word you want is epitome, not epiphany.

      --
      NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
    6. Re:Summary is sensationalistic by tibman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I did some quick research.

      According to California officials, there are no laws that would bar Google from testing such models, as long as there's a human behind the wheel who would be responsible should something go wrong.

      Taken from here: http://jalopnik.com/5661240/are-googles-driverless-cars-legal which was linked in the article from the summary.

      However i would say that there is a difference from operating the car and manually driving the car. The google spokesperson used the phrase, manually driving.

      --
      http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
    7. Re:Summary is sensationalistic by ColdWetDog · · Score: 3, Funny

      Ah yes, the epiphany of epitome.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    8. Re:Summary is sensationalistic by jklovanc · · Score: 2

      How do we know that the following condition didn't happen;

      The car was in automatic drive.
      A problem occurred and it appeared that a crash was about to occur.
      The driver took control of the vehicle
      There was not enough time to avoid the crash and the crash occurred.

      Google can truthfully say that at the time of the crash the car was in manual control but the crash was still caused by the computer.

    9. Re:Summary is sensationalistic by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 3, Funny

      The article has an update, which says the incident forced a chain-collision among 3 Priuses (Preii?) and an Accord.

      So it appears that only one car was affected.

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    10. Re:Summary is sensationalistic by Anthony+Mouse · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The other thing to consider is who is at fault for the collision. There are situations where, it doesn't matter who you are, you can't avoid a collision through no fault of your own. Example: You're driving in a construction zone with a car to your left and a construction barrier to your right. A deer jumps over the barrier and lands two feet in front of your car. You only get to choose whether you hit the deer, the barrier or the car to your left. There is no choice that avoids a collision. If a self-driving car is put in that situation, it has the same alternatives, and we shouldn't be at all surprised when some similar situation ultimately occurs.

    11. Re:Summary is sensationalistic by SmilingBoy · · Score: 2

      The last one was when the ABS released the brakes because I hit a pothole when I was braking. One wheel locked because it was over a hole and the system came to the conclusion that the car was on a slippery surface. Another near crash I had due to ABS was when I stepped on the brakes just as the pavement dropped down in a ramp. The system apparently interpreted the sudden downwards acceleration as a bigger than normal deceleration and unlocked the brakes.

      In both cases the ABS probably reacted correctly and may have saved you from a less controllable situation. ABS works on each wheel separately so in the cases you experienced, breaks would still be applied on at least two wheels.

      It makes sense to release the brake over a pothole as the wheel locks and will provide less traction once it hits the normal road surface again. It probably also makes sense to release the brakes on the wheel opposite the one that hit the pothole so asymmetric braking forces (which making the car less controllable) are reduced.

      The pavement drop most likely unloaded the wheel, which then started locking. Again, it makes sense to release the brakes for a moment to prevent the wheel locking

      Remember: a locked wheel provides much less breaking force than a wheel that is spinning (except on loose snow or loose gravel where the snow/gravel gets piled up in front of a locked wheel).

    12. Re:Summary is sensationalistic by ComaVN · · Score: 2

      But seriously I also think that the way the towers imploded and collapsed looked very controlled and artificial

      Did you see some other towers collapse than I did? It doesn't look anything like a controller implosion. For one thing, controlled implosions always "pancake" from the bottom, with the main mass of the building squashing the lowest floors first. (See here, or any of a million other videos), while the WTC pancaked from around the point of impact, or 3/4 of the way up.

      Secondly, the towers didn't come straight down at all, Notice the tilt of the top part in this video. The towers coming down did some serious damage to neighbouring buildings on their way down, too.

      --
      Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
    13. Re:Summary is sensationalistic by RoFLKOPTr · · Score: 2

      Example: You're driving in a construction zone with a car to your left and a construction barrier to your right. A deer jumps over the barrier and lands two feet in front of your car. You only get to choose whether you hit the deer, the barrier or the car to your left. There is no choice that avoids a collision. If a self-driving car is put in that situation, it has the same alternatives, and we shouldn't be at all surprised when some similar situation ultimately occurs.

      Or when the two drivers' roles are reversed and the other one swerves into you to avoid the deer. Neither situation would be your fault, but in your original scenario you would be considered at fault because you're the one that caused the collision.

      The huge difference is that an automated car would be able to see that deer coming and initiate a correction before it's even visible to the driver. It would take a human driver close to a second after the deer is visible before he even computes that there's a deer jumping in front of him... and then your puny human brain has to calculate the safest action to take and then perform that action. An automated car could perform that entire process in a matter of milliseconds and then perform a highly-skilled maneuver that takes advantage of its 360-degree field of view... another thing that we humans aren't so blessed with.

  3. Wildly misleading headline by Bovius · · Score: 5, Informative

    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"

    1. Re:Wildly misleading headline by emurphy42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      TFAs are largely about questioning whether
      (a) it was indeed the human's fault
      (b) the robot effed up first, then the human took over and attempted (unsuccessfully) to recover

  4. Who is to blame? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Why, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo! and may be Oracle too!

  5. Built Upon Failures by agent_vee · · Score: 2

    Why would one crash bring an end to robotic cars? Crashes can be expected while they are still developing this car.

    1. Re:Built Upon Failures by ScrewMaster · · Score: 2

      Concorde was killed off for many other reasons unrelated to the crash, most critically, it was a money and fuel sponge.

      Nuclear, though, I agree. Apparently coal and it's hundreds to thousands of deaths is ok because we've had it since man first sent child into a mine shaft to play in the dirt. Nuclear though, GAAH! MUTANT THREE EYED FISH!!!!

      Yes, and what's tragironic about that is that many coal fields are naturally radioactive, and we (as in "pretty much everyone on the planet") have been breathing thorium dust for over a century now. Thorium that would have been better of staying in the ground. The unfortunate reality is that some number of people die every year just from that particular aspect of our use of coal for power. Well-designed nuclear power facilities (and no, I don't mean obsolescent junk like what lit off in Japan recently, and please don't bring up Chernobyl: that dirty bomb on steroids had no business ever being built ... leave it to the Russians to nuke themselves) does a *HELL* of a lot better job of keeping radioactive particulates out of our atmosphere. But you can't tell that to some people because they've already up their minds. Like it or not, coal power has a very definite, very predictable, and very real cost in human life.

      Coal burning has a number of nasty biological effects unrelated to radioactivity, but that's another issue. More people have already died from coal-fired power plants than will ever die from nuclear fission. You can't tell that to some people either.

      --
      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  6. 100% reliability not needed by KingSkippus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:100% reliability not needed by Riceballsan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Good for you, but unfortunately that only means you are more sane then a lawmaker, the lobbyists etc... The problem is if there is a single fatality, or even minor accidents, a large group will rise up screaming about how unsafe the cars are, and they will be disallowed from driving on public roads. Even if the average rate of accidents and fatalities is 1/16th of human rates. Most laws can be stopped by focusing on the 1% of the time something is worse and completely ignoring the 99% of the time they were better.

    2. Re:100% reliability not needed by ColdWetDog · · Score: 3, Funny

      you say this now, but wait until the smartcar you're in gets caught in an infinite loop!

      So you get lost around the Apple campus. What's the big deal?

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    3. Re:100% reliability not needed by jamesh · · Score: 2

      I wonder how much of that sort of driving they have put the googlemobile through? Being a tester would be a whole lot of fun... set the googlemobile down a freeway and everyone else gets to cut it off etc and see how it responds.

      It'd make sense to do this in a simulator... a good deal cheaper... actually, come to think of it, I'd be vastly surprised if Google hasn't already done this.

      Scene 2: A bunch of google tech's crowded around their broken googlemobile, scratching their heads and muttering "strange... it worked perfectly in the simulator"

  7. Does Everyone on CA own a Prius or Accord? by adisakp · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Does Everyone on CA own a Prius or Accord? by itchythebear · · Score: 4, Funny

      That would explain that cloud of smug that has been collecting over California.

      --
      If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
  8. Re:This is Slashdot. by sneakyimp · · Score: 5, Funny

    Man Crashes Car? That's no story. CAR CRASHES MAN!!! Now *that's* a story.

  9. I think it was depressed. by Pneathery · · Score: 2

    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.

  10. Why so antagonistic? by Marc_Hawke · · Score: 2

    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--
  11. You can't really blame Google by Jeremi · · Score: 2

    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.
  12. In soviet russia by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 2

    car crashes you!

  13. Re:This is Slashdot. by hrimhari · · Score: 2

    Except in Soviet Russia...

    --
    http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
  14. ob XKCD by rocket+rancher · · Score: 2

    ob XKCD