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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.
Or at 11 it's still not their fault. Remember, these vehicles are logging 10,000 miles per week - there's a lot more opportunities to be rear-ended by an inattentive driver when one is on the road that much than there are for a typical driver. By way of example, in the video from the article at Medium there were two cars in front of the driverless car that had also stopped at the light - there was nowhere else for the driverless car to go.
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.
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.
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
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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3) You haven't had a brake job on your car for years and you have the stopping distance of a fully loaded train
I would agree with you except I've been rear-ended and almost hit (sometimes with tire lockup) simply because I choose to stop at red lights before turning right, even if the traffic is clear. I seriously want a dashcam so the next time I get hit in this situation I'll be able to demonstrate I was following the rules when I was hit, regardless of what the fellow behind me is ranting on about.
Look, I'm not a perfect driver but to assume others will break the rules as you do is just asking for trouble.
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
It's possible that the Google car is not giving out "body language" that telegraphs behavior before it happens. If you are about to slow down, you might move your head to check your mirrors, let off the gas a little bit, possibly maneuver in the lane, little things that humans could detect subconsciously. If the Google car just enters a slowing-down event, it might be undetectable.
I know as a motorcycle rider, I've suspected someone was about to do something stupid just before they did and it's saved me a few times.
Notice how the self driving car stopped when the car in front of it stopped. the human driven car didn't....
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).
To be fair, you're asking the self-driving car to do something that most humans can't do. :p
the problem in city driving is IF you leave a carlength, a car will fill that spot.
I think it is perhaps *partly* the Google car's fault.
Thank goodness we don't use your thinking processes as law
I wonder if the Google car itself serves as a distraction to other drives.
Only the ones who would also be distracted by many other things, they are already a menace.
Reminds me of the old Japer Carrott joke about bad driving: "My mother in-law has been driving 40 years and never had an accident - but she's seen thousands..."
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Unless the person in the car in front of you had previously cut your brakes, it still isn't their fault, which is the point.
It's not as simple as assigning fault.
YES, it IS.
Otherwise losers like you would be clogging up the courts with your lame excuses as to why you rear-ended someone. It's your goddamn fault and that's the end of it.
YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE IN CONTROL OF YOUR CAR AT ALL TIMES.
That's not so hard, is it?
Yeah, I don't see any reason to think that the Google car is at fault. I was once rear-ended twice in the same month, while stopped at the same red light. There wasn't anything particularly wrong with the layout of the light either. It boils down to this: People are not good at driving.
To those reading this: Oh, I know, I get it. You're great at driving, and insulted by any suggestion to the contrary. Your reflexes are great, and you're in control when you're on the road. You even drive stick because you need the extra control that it gives you, and not at all because you like to imaging you're a race car driver.
But really and honestly, if you haven't been in accidents, as much as skill and safe driving may have contributed to your safety, luck has really contributed just as much. All things considered, we're generally not very good at driving, and the result is that tens of thousands of people die every year. As far as I'm concerned, we should make it a goal to work to get safe self driving cars on the road ASAP, and then get really strict on issuing drivers licenses so that almost nobody is allowed to do it.
Where was this? I want to move there.
The driver two cars ahead of the autonomus car was stopped at a green light (according tot he video), properly avoiding entering the intersection until they could drive through it (there is a car stopped immediately at the end of the intersection according to the video).
That is some good driving on everyone's part, except the driver of the Lexus who rear-ended the autonomous car of course.
Computer driving system needs to avoid all accidents, not just proclaim after each one "its not its fault!"
Maybe you can explain how a car is supposed to avoid getting rear-ended when there is no place to go.
As far as I'm concerned, we should make it a goal to work to get safe self driving cars on the road ASAP, and then get really strict on issuing drivers licenses so that almost nobody is allowed to do it.
That goal might be a technically sound one, but I don't think it's politically viable. Telling people they are not allowed to drive their car anymore is likely to be even less popular than telling Americans they can't own a gun anymore.
A more attainable way to improve safety would be to allow people to continue to drive if they want to, but to add intelligent accident-avoidance software to the automobile so that when the person is driving, if the car notices he is about to cause a crash, it can step in and take the necessary actions to avoid or minimize the crash. In this case, if the car noticed that the driver wasn't braking sufficiently to avoid rear-ending the car in front, it could start applying the brakes for him. This approach is not only possible, but is already implemented in some cars.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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'm replying to this... and in the process undoing a bunch of mods I just did, because it appears nobody else is going to say it...
Defensive driving is not as cool as you think it is! I'll give you two examples:
1) I had a buddy who owned a Comp/TA. It's a fairly rare car, and his was pristine. He was approaching an intersection on a highway, about 50 mph, when he saw flashing lights approaching from the side. He stopped to allow the cop to cross traffic against the light, but looked up at his rear view mirror and saw that the truck behind him wasn't going to stop in time, as evidenced by the skidding and fishtailing. He lit it up it despite the cop almost being in the intersection, and pulled over on the opposite side. The truck slid into then through the space my friend had previously been occupying. The cop made a left (causing him to drive past my friend) and gave him a look like "not recommended, but ok", and continued on to whatever emergency he was headed to.
2) I had a girlfriend driving in stop-and-go traffic on a rural street, light turns green, but the second we cleared the intersection traffic slowed again, and the driver behind us didn't notice. She crept forward close to the service truck in front of us to try to give a little more space, but to no avail, the driver behind us hit us anyways, and pushed us into the truck. The driver who hit us paid for our damage, but my girlfriend was at fault for hitting the truck... "Why" you ask??? Because the space in front of you is the safety buffer to prevent multiple car accidents when there doesn't need to be.
My personal experience is that story #1 is the ONLY INSTANCE I HAVE EVER HEARD of defensive driving successfully preventing a major accident, while the second story is so common as to be the flavor I hear nearly every time. It's quite rare to hear a story like yours where moving forward 1/2 car length was enough to save the day. The problem is this: you are gambling that by moving forward a tiny bit that you buy the idiot behind you enough time to realize what is going on and react. But the cost you incur is the loss of your buffer if they don't notice, and thus involving one more poor schmo in the accident. In other words, you actively chose to bring another party into the accident by your decision, and therefore you are at fault.
I'm sure that defensive driving techniques can be incorporated into self driving cars for situations like story #1, but you'll probably see that in Mercedes before you see it in Fiat.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
I've NEVER been rear-ended in the UK because of something like that. People just fucking well pay attention.
Really, that's your logic? "X has never happened to me personally, therefore it must never happen in the UK"?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Of course there will be a time where manual driving will be outlawed
Why "of course"? If automatic-crash-avoidance technology can make it so that even (semi)manually-driven cars can't get into accidents, then there would be no safety benefit to outlawing (semi)manually-driven cars.
I can imagine a law requiring manually-driven cars to have crash-avoidance technology installed, though.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
That absolutely matters not one iota. It's common fucking sense, and in no way a mystery. The "little things" we rely on to know when a car is slowing down are called "brake lights", and the Google cars use them. If some muppet can't even see the car in front has stopped, I doubt the driver of said car twitching their left eye a bit is going to help at all.
This is one instance where the market can really help. Insurance for these autonomous cars will be lower than manual cars, as they are in fewer accidents. That will encourage their uptake. Of course there will be a time where manual driving will be outlawed, and if you really like driving so much then, take it to the race track and don't let your hobby endanger people who are merely trying to live their lives.
When self-driving cars can negotiate in bad weather conditions (i.e. ice, snow, slush, etc.), that's when I'll buy into your future. There is a reason why Google chose relatively warm, dry areas with typically good weather. Bad weather and poor roads makes things 100x harder for self-driving cars. Not to mention the ability to handle out of ordinary conditions or events. Figure these out, then get back to me about giving up manual driving. Until then, it's a mote point....
Oh, and I forgot to mention that they need to be able to tow things, like boats... Towing is the last thing on Google's mind...
4) The road is covered with ice, snow, gravel, oil or other substances that eliminate your tires' ability to engage with the road.
(This is why those of us in the northern part of the country are cheering for driver-less cars, but realistically think they might only be useful six months out of the year.)
You are supposed to drive with consideration of the stopping distance. Shitty road conditions do not mean the accident is faultless.
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.
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A more attainable way to improve safety would be to allow people to continue to drive if they want to, but to add intelligent accident-avoidance software to the automobile so that when the person is driving, if the car notices he is about to cause a crash, it can step in and take the necessary actions to avoid or minimize the crash.
Let me fix this for you...
Your auto insurance deductible is $100 when the car is self-driving, but $1,000 when you're manually driving. If the car is self-driving and it causes a wreck, the auto manufacture is liable, if you're driving, then you are.
You don't have to ban people from driving, you just use carrots and sticks to make people want to stop driving.
My insurance premium is ã350/year. Cut it to zero and you're still going to struggle to cover the cost of the sensors, the software and the maintenance of the autonomous system.
Will that remain true when your premium rises to £3,500/year without those things?
> 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
The way most people drive, they wouldn't have any option to avoid the crash. According to the video, though, the Google car did better. It did as taught is advanced driving classes and left enough room that it could have pulled to the right, into the turn lane, and even driven away, as it detected the fast-moving car approaching from behind. That's taught as a more safe way to stop - think car jackings, a cement truck coming up fast from the rear, or an ambulance trying to get through. You can get out of the way or leave the area entirely if you leave six to eight feet between you and the car ahead.
the car was hit by another Google employee.
It was hit by a Yahoo car.
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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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