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Google Self-Driving Car Rear-Ended In First Injury Accident
An anonymous reader writes: Google's autonomous car project, as of June, hadn't been in any accidents that involved an injury. That changed on July 1st, though it wasn't the technology's fault. A Lexus SUV that was self-driving while carrying three Google employees was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light in Mountain View, California. All three employees had minor cases of whiplash, and were quickly checked out and released from the hospital. The other driver had minor neck and back pain as well. Chris Umson, head of the autonomous car project, said, "Other drivers have hit us 14 times since the start of our project in 2009 (including 11 rear-enders), and not once has the self-driving car been the cause of the collision. Instead, the clear theme is human error and inattention. We'll take all this as a signal that we're starting to compare favorably with human drivers." He also posted a short video of how the self-driving car was tracking other vehicles at the time of the crash — including the one that hit it.
1) You were tailgating.
2) You weren't paying attention and hit the brake too slow.
It is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE to hit the rear of a car that is not moving toward you if. A) you leave the legally required amount of distance behind it, and B) You hit the break when it slows down.
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According to their tracking data on the cars near them, there was more than enough stopping distance for this particular case. Humans can get distracted.
It's not the same car each time, dummy. They've already stated their accident rate per miles logged over their whole fleet of cars is lower than then the national average.
Well clearly it does have rearward sensing abilities as you can see from the video. The car was boxed in, so it really had nowhere to go.
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Right about average. The average US driver drives 13.476 miles per year and goes an average of 10 years between accidents.
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There are 50ish cars with over 200 "drivers" of them in California. These are used by more than one person, and get a lot of miles on them. And this is just in California. With the amounts of miles these cars get on them, they're not typical driving patterns: Google claims that their fleet has clocked over 1 million miles on the road. 11 "not at fault" accidents over 1 million miles doesn't sound out of the realm of possibility.
the problem in city driving is IF you leave a carlength, a car will fill that spot.
While perhaps true in some cases, it is rather clear from the linked video that it is entirely the human's fault in this case. Unless you have different 'rules of the road' than we do here and the driverless car was expected to do something else (what exactly are you expecting the driverless car to do? It isn't clear that there were lots of options from the video - perhaps move ahead a foot but it seems like that would at best delay the crash). There were two cars stopped at the light, the Google car was behind it, and there were about four or five car lengths between the Google car and the car that rear ended it. The two cars ahead and the Google car stopped well ahead of the at fault vehicle and the at fault vehicle did not slow down.
I had to RTFA to find this out. It's hard to see because it's so far ahead of the Google car, but you can see little purple shapes on the other side of the intersection. Basically the next block was full due to heavy traffic (probably rush hour), and that driver stopped so as to not "block the box". Driver behind was not paying attention and failed to stop even with a large following distance.
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You are crazy. And I mean it. CRAAAAZY.
In a rear impact, the impact energy is redistributed into: 1. Braking friction, if brakes are applied. 2. Crushing energy. 3. Inertia of the car. When you reduce #1 - apply less brakes - more energy gets redirected towards #3. Assuming a slow crash with no significant incursion into the passenger compartment, the injuries scale with accelerations. The more energy you pass to your car's inertia, generally higher the accelerations will be. The braking force is replaced by inertial forces, but these are simply proportional to acceleration of the car, and its occupants - meaning you.
In a rear impact, if you release the brakes, you will experience higher impact acceeleration and deceleration than if you didn't. This directly translates into the trauma your neck and other body parts are subject to. All that in the name of what? Less damage to your car? Yes, you are crazy, unless your car is worth more than human life ($10M+).
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