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.

Comments

Crash Mitigation

[jazzy82slave]

If Google's self-driving car was able to track the car that rear-ended it, I wonder if there are ways to mitigate this kind of "predictable" crash. Maybe letting off the brakes a tad to lessen the impact, or (out of left field idea) deploy air bags on the bumpers?

Seems like if the real issue is "everyone else" in driving you would think Google could come up with ways to reduce the impact level of inevitable crashes.

Re:Northeast winters

[buk110]

I'd be curious to see how it responds to really weird northeast conditions like a snow squall or black-ice. Or my personal favorite, when it's really snowing and you need to make sure you're stopped in a good spot that you can get traction once you can start moving again

Re:Exchanging insurance information

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Insurance companies have this information at their fingertips. Here are some public numbers:

1.2-1.5 deaths for every 100M miles travelled
185 crashes for every 100M miles travelled (or 300 if only 45% are reported)

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and http://www.caranddriver.com/fe...

However, in my experience, those numbers are pretty low. My wife and I have been involved in 3 accidents around a mid-sized city over the past 10 years (probably about 300,000 miles, or 1 crash per 100K miles), and I remember getting into a minor fender-bender (hardly ever reported) with someone about once a year when I worked near Chicago (1 crash per 20K miles).

I've driven behind one of these cars

[rsborg]

They do very unpredictable driving school-level things like slow/stop where deep shadows fall on the road. Like very suddenly. And then they stay there for a few seconds.

I'm not surprised there's finally a rear-ending. I'm actually surprised it took so long.