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Google Self-Driving Car Might Have Caused First Crash In Autonomous Mode (roboticstrends.com)
An anonymous reader writes: While driving in autonomous mode, a Google self-driving car was involved in an accident with a public bus in California on Valentine's Day, according to an accident report filed with the California DMV.The accident report, signed by Chris Urmson, says the Google self-driving car was trying to get around some sandbags on a street when its left front struck the bus' right side. The car was going 2 mph, while the bus was going 15 mph.Google said its car's safety driver thought the bus would yield. No injuries were reported. If it's determined the Google self-driving car was at fault, it would be the first time one of its cars caused an accident while in autonomous mode.
An unsafe lane change would make it the Google cars fault.
The fault is on the vehicle that was changing lanes. Unless they were both changing lanes, it's not a shared fault.
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Google is now saying they were following the "spirit of the road" when the crash happened and that they've reviewed the incident, as well as thousands of variations on it, in a driving simulator and made refinements to its AV software.
According to the report, they were side-by-side in the same, double-wide lane, hence the shared responsibility. Here's a Street View picture of the turn in question. Apparently, the sequence was:
1) Red light.
2) Google car signals for a right turn.
3) Google car gets into right side of the double-wide lane and passes cars that are stopped for the red light.
4) Google car has to stop because there are sandbags blocking the storm drain.
5) Light turns green, cars start moving.
6) Google car waits for cars to pass to create an opening, then slowly moves back towards the center of the lane.
7) Bus decides not to yield to the Google car that's ahead of it in the lane, trying to pass it anyway.
8) Bus gets its nose a bit ahead of the Google car.
9) Google car doesn't turn the wheel back in time and scrapes the side of the bus.
More or less, the Google car technically had the right of way, because it was in the same lane as the bus but ahead of it, but the bus had every reason to think the Google car, which was stopped, would cede the right of way to it just the same as it had to several other cars, and thus had clearly decided to pass the Google car. Which is to say, the bus created the situation that caused the impact when it failed to yield to a car that had the right of way, but that doesn't give the Google car a free pass to cause an accident with a vehicle that's already begun passing it. Both had every reason to believe the other would behave differently, yet an accident still occurred, so it's likely a case of shared responsibility.
Of course, most humans would have the common sense to avoid iffy maneuvers around a bus, and the bus driver may have been expecting that as well.
The law says a right-hand turn shall be made as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway. So Google's self-driving cars have been making their right turns illegally until just recently.
I expected better from Google.
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That's pretty screwed up. In the U.S., she might get a ticket, but the cyclist would be found to be 100% at fault for the wreck. Speed limit on the roads in the U.S. are, by law, required to be set such that a vehicle moving at the limit would have adequate time to stop even if there's a vehicle stopped or other obstruction on the road, and that's probably true in Canada as well. If a vehicle approaching from behind fails to stop, regardless of the reason why the vehicle fails to stop, that vehicle should always be at fault unless the front vehicle shifted into the lane in front of another car and then immediately slammed on the brakes.
I find it particularly mind-boggling that the judge found that the motorcyclist's grossly excessive speed was not a significant factor. The motorcyclist was going 80 in a 55 zone. That's 145% of the posted speed limit. The motorcyclist would have gotten automatic jail time for that sort of gross recklessness in most of the U.S., had he survived. More to the point, had he been traveling the speed limit, he would have had almost twice as long to slow down, and likely would have been able to dodge the car entirely.
As for the Google situation, legally, it likely depends on how far back the bus driver was when the Google car started around. With that said, San Francisco bus drivers are (or so I'm told by friends who are crazy enough to actually drive there) notorious for not stopping for cars stopped in bus lanes. Google's car needs to make the assumption that Muni buses never yield the right of way even if they legally should. Anything less is just inviting an accident. :-)
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