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Google's Self-Driving Cars: 300,000 Miles Logged, Not a Single Accident
An anonymous reader writes "The automated cars are slowly building a driving record that's better than that of your average American. From the article: 'Ever since Google began designing its self-driving cars, they've wanted to build cars that go beyond the capabilities of human-piloted vehicles, cars that are much, much safer. When Sebastian Thrun announced the project in 2010, he wrote, "According to the World Health Organization, more than 1.2 million lives are lost every year in road traffic accidents. We believe our technology has the potential to cut that number, perhaps by as much as half."
New data indicate that Google's on the right path. Earlier this week the company announced that the self-driving cars have now logged some 300,000 miles and "there hasn't been a single accident under computer control." (The New York Times did note in a 2010 article that a self-driving car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light, so Google must not be counting the incidents that were the fault of flawed humans.)'"
The GoogleMobile was behaving properly, and was stopped. It had no possible way to evade the puny human that hit it.
However, after the accident, the GoogleMobile was heard asking another car, "Hey, hot mama, wanna kill all humans?"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It's hard to imagine being found at-fault when you are stopped and rear-ended.
There's no shame in being involved in an accident if it's not your fault.
We trust others all around us every day to avoid smashing into us. Even the best drivers get hit.
I want to know about interference between cars. I've only see one self-driving car tested at a time. If there's hundreds within visual range of each other are their radar and laser sensors going to have much more noise?
The little experience I have with robots is that laser range finders like to bounce off things and skew readings. How do the cars deal with that?
It is indeed an impressive statistic about the number of accidents by the self-driving car of Google. This does prove that their decision making algorithms are good.
However, comparison to humans is probably not fair. Human mind is more prone to giving in to temptation. Exceeding speed limits, violating lane changing rules once in a while to get ahead, talking while driving, texting while driving, getting distracted by the hot chick/dude in the car in the next lane are all errors that humans would routinely make. Some of them would lead to accidents where the erring driver suffers an accident. Some lead to an innocent driver suffering due to the errors of others. It is the latter condition where the Self-Driving car's algorithms appear good --- handling exceptions generated by human drivers, pedestrians and traffic.
So far I've never seen an explanation, but all these situations have occurred to me within the last year:
(1) Construction zone, worker standing with a temporary "slow/stop" sign indicating when cars can proceed on a one-lane section shared between both directions alternately.
(2) Baseball rolls out into street in residential area, followed soon by child who was initially invisible behind a parked minivan. I knew ball might be followed by someone, and slowed way down so this wasn't a problem. At normal speed, it would have been.
(3) Nearly invisible ice around curve, one other car had slid off road. I knew to greatly reduce speed even below normal winter operating conditions.
(4) Two lanes in each direction road. Noticed other car weaving around unpredictably, and later noticed driver occupied with cell phone. I then knew not to drive next to this vehicle even though that would have been fine in other conditions.
How would google's car handle these situations?
That's a 1 in 6,500 chance of *dying* in a traffic accident.
The moment even one accident does occur, no matter how mild the consequences or much more unlikely the circumstances compared to a human driver, hordes upon hordes of American luddites will man the lines to do their civic duty to shit upon the idea of cars that drive themselves.
Mind you, this is being said by an American who owns a US made car.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
I live in Reno, and Google's Self Driving cars are legal on road here (complete with cool plates with infinity logo: http://www.jumpthecurve.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/18164996_BG1.jpg)
A few things:
1) Has google partnered at all with any manufacturers to have this ability on a future car I can buy?
2) or as an upgrade to existing cars?
I'm hoping they don't get stuck in red tape legal limbo hell, and that more states other than my own Nevada jump on board. I regularly make 3.5 - 4 hour drive to friends in California. If I could just jump in the car, pop in an address, and take a nap, play on my iPad, or whatever while the car drove that'd be awesome. Or a ride home from a bar if I've been drinking and don't want to taxi and leave the car behind.
Or imagine a friend asks for a ride someplace? No problem, I send the car over on its own, and he can just tell it to come back to my house afterwards.
There are tons of ideas I can think of where this would be very damned useful.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
Pretty much this.
Google deliberately avoids the more challenging situations, and a LOT of those miles are highway.
There's a reason insurance rates for someone living in a small town in the country are lower. Right now, google is pretty much "that guy".
That's not to disparage what google has accomplished, but its premature to compare it to the safety record of a downtown urban commuter; driving through rush hour traffic to and from work in a major city daily.
How many times has the Google-mobile pulled into and out of parking spaces at busy malls? Frankly, that's where I've had my accidents.