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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.
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.
This sig consists of eleven words, twenty syllables, and sixty-one letters.
3) You haven't had a brake job on your car for years and you have the stopping distance of a fully loaded train
Notice how the self driving car stopped when the car in front of it stopped. the human driven car didn't....
To be fair, you're asking the self-driving car to do something that most humans can't do. :p
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.
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?