#SelfDriving Google car involved in crash in #MountainView. #Google tells us the other vehicle ran a red light. Photo by @grommet. pic.twitter.com/Wwu5MYGPDJ
— Katie Marzullo (@KatieABC7) September 24, 2016
As self-driving cars become more of a reality, they’ll be greeted by one certain foe as they assimilate to the roadways: humans, and more specifically, their errors. For as far as the world has come technology wise, there will always be humans doing human things on the roadways. It’s your classic Man vs. Robot battle, really.
This past Friday we were reminded of the fact that robot-cars and humans are increasingly sharing the roads, sometimes unsuccessfully when a Google Self-Driving Lexus RX car was t-boned by a human-driven car in Califonia. The Google Lexus RX car reportedly sensed the other driver crossing the intersection and braked, but it was too late to avoid the impending collision.
The car that struck the Google Self-Driving car was later found to have run a red light. According to Google, their autonomous car did not begin moving forward until at least six-seconds after the light turned green, thus leaving no doubt as to who was at fault in the crash. No one was injured in the crash, the Google car took quite a beating in the collision.
Officials at Google offered a statement in response to news of the self-driving car collision:
“Thousands of crashes happen everyday on U.S. roads, and red-light running is the leading cause of urban crashes in the U.S. Human error plays a role in 94% of these crashes, which is why we’re developing fully self-driving technology to take human error out of the equation and make our roads safer.”
A Google spokesperson added in the statement that just once has a Google Self-Driving car been at fault in a collision. The human-autonomous car dust-up is just the latest example as to what self-driving cars biggest obstacles will be on the road. There really isn’t a clear solution to this problem coming in the near-future, so the two will have to co-exist until one of them is completely extinguished.
Did we just come up with the plot to another Transformers movie? Call us, Michael Bay.
(Via KRON4)
