The future might be electric, self-driving vehicles. But we're not going to get there without a few scratches and bumps... Literally.
Google and the state of California has revealed the first public details about accidents and crashes involving its nascent fleet of self-driving cars.
Of the 48 self-driving cars on the roads of California operating under licences issued since September 2014, four have been involved in accidents in the last eight months, the report by the state Department of Motor Vehicles said. Three of those cars were operated Google, while the fourth belonged to Delphi.
Urmson said that over 1.7 million miles of driving had resulted in only "light damage" and "no injuries". Google said each of the incidents was the fault of a human driver, and that "minor fender benders" were usually involved due to another driver rear-ending the car. "We’ve been hit from behind seven times, mainly at traffic lights but also on the freeway," Urmson said. "We’ve also been side-swiped a couple of times and hit by a car rolling through a stop sign. And as you might expect, we see more accidents per mile driven on city streets than on freeways; we were hit 8 times in many fewer miles of city driving."
While Google's rate of accidents ostensibly falls well below the National Highway Traffic Survey average of 0.3 damage-only accidents per 100,000 miles, Google noted that so many minor accidents are not reported it is difficult to compare accurate figures.
Google is learning not only how robots drive, but how humans drive said Urmson -- a critical part of the project given autonomous cars will almost certainly share the roads with humans for a very long time. "We see people turning onto, and then driving on, the wrong side of the road a lot --particularly at night, it’s common for people to overshoot or undershoot the median," he said. "And other times, cars seem to behave as if we’re not there." "We’ll continue to drive thousands of miles so we can all better understand the all too common incidents that cause many of us to dislike day to day driving — and we’ll continue to work hard on developing a self-driving car that can shoulder this burden for us."
Delphi, a parts supplier, said that one of its two autonomous cars was involved in a collision at a crossroads when in manual driving mode. Five other companies testing autonomous vehicles in California have not been involved in any accidents.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
