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Apple Records First-Ever Accident In Self-Driving Car Program (appleinsider.com)
Apple's self-driving car program has reported its first-ever accident, according to a filing to the state's DMV. No injuries were reported. AppleInsider reports: A test car was rear-ended by a Nissan Leaf while merging onto an expressway, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said on Twitter. The Apple vehicle suffered "moderate" damage. Details are still forthcoming, so it's unclear if the fault was with the Nissan driver, Apple's hardware and software, or some combination of the two. In an update, AppleInsider provided the following information: "The Apple vehicle, a Lexus SUV, was merging onto the Lawrence Expressway in California's Bay Area on Aug. 24, Gurman later wrote, citing a filing by Apple's Steve Kenner with the Department of Motor Vehicles. The Leaf was moving at just 15 miles per hour, but was also damaged."
That is correct -- at least in general.
However it seems likely that we will see more accidents where a self driving car is rear ended by a non-self driving car (after factoring out the increased number of non-self driving cars that have some form of collision avoidance built into them). Self driving cars are just going to behave differently than human piloted ones - esp. with respect to detecting a hazard that actually doesn't exist and braking unexpectedly. This, in fact, is apparently somewhat why the Uber self-driving car that killed the jaywalking pedestrian had it's "sensitivity" to objects dialed down -- when it was turned up, it resulted in a jerky ride as the car reacted to stuff that wasn't a problem at all.
If someone jams their brakes on for no reason on a freeway traveling at the speed limit, they may actually be at fault in a civil suit for the massive pileup that may result. This is called brake checking and is unsafe practice.
I'm guessing, knowing these merge lanes on Lawrence, that the Lexus appeared to the driver behind to have identified "its slot" and appeared to be taking that slot. At that point, the following driver probably began to devote more attention to identifying a slot they were going to squeeze into instead of to the Lexus because they were under the impression that the Lexus would continue its merge in a "human expected" fashion but the Lexus got "nervous" and aborted the merge and stopped -- but the driver behind was looking over to his left, not straight ahead. The driver in the back is, of course, at fault.
There's an added twist on a good portion of Lawrence -- the RIGHT lane is a car pool lane and that's what you merge into. If you're not a carpool, you have a fairly limited opportunity to get over one lane before you're subject to an expensive moving violation. During moderate rush hour it can be hard to get over in time. This motivates the person doing the merge to consider additional factors which is an additional distraction.
I think the merge problem in moderately heavy rush hour traffic will, in general, be an Achilles' heel for self driving cars. There's actually few opportunities to "safely" (applying the law of physics, the requirement not to interfere with a car which has the right of way on the main road, and the need for self-driving cars to be risk adverse for PR and legal reasons) merge -- there simply are no slots available to "safely" (leaving required distance in front and behind the cars that the self driving car merges between) because cars are already traveling "too close" to each other and certainly not over twice the safe distance from each other for the speed they are traveling. This is likely to result in the first self driving car on each entrance as rush hour picks up simply stopping at the end of the merge lane (making it, of course, even harder to eventually merge) and sitting there until rush hour is over and traffic is light enough to allow it to come from a dead stop to a safe merge with no merge lane left for acceleration. Of course, there is a servo effect here -- once every entrance has ten or so self driving cars blocking it, traffic will lighten up and they will slowly trickle onto the freeway -- but the service streets will be a mess and a trip that would have taken one hour might take three hours.