Self driving cars are all the rage, with automakers and autonomous vehicle start-ups racing to be the first to deliver a truly automated driving experience to the masses.
But as recent developments have revealed, it will be a quite long time until you can hop in a self driving car and take it wherever you like, or even just call up a self-driving taxi to take you across town.
A recent article by Gizmodo entitled ‘The Deadly Recklessness of the Self Driving Car Industry’ highlighted the various controversies associated with autonomous vehicles and those that develop them.
The most well-known incident involving a self-driving car is the accident that killed 49-year old Elaine Herzberg. In that instance, a self-driving Uber prototype vehicle was travelling down a dimly lit street in Las Vegas when it hit and killed Herzberg as she crossed the street with her bicycle. An autonomous vehicle ‘operator’ was in the vehicle at the time, but camera footage revealed they weren’t looking at the road at the time of the crash. They were allegedly watching NBC’s The Voice on their phone at the time of the crash.
Lesser known but similarly concerning accidents have happened within Google’s self-driving car program, now called Waymo. Gizmodo references an anecdote from 2011 in which a Google autonomous vehicle prototype accidentally boxed in another motorist and caused them to crash. The self-driving vehicle, which had two operators in it at the time of the accident, continued down the road and the incident was never reported to the authorities. Five years later, reports surfaced that Google’s self-driving car program had caused its “first crash,” – a telling sign of the lack of transparency within the industry.
General Motors’ self-driving car project, Cruise Automation, has also had its problems. The company was sued by a motorcyclist earlier this year after one of its Chevrolet Bolt EV-based test vehicles swerved into him while in self-driving mode, causing him to fall over and injure himself. The California DMV reported there was a “long scuff” on the passenger side of the Cruise AV after the collision. A Wired article from 2017 described riding in one of the Cruise prototypes as a “herky-jerky,” experience that needed refinement. Cruise’s prototypes err on the side of caution and may hit the brakes hard and quickly in some scenarios.
Gizmodo says these crashes are the result of corporations wanting to be the first to bring autonomous vehicle technology to market. With billions of dollars at stake, companies are desperate to develop the tech and offer it to the masses. So while a self-driving car may not be that unsafe when in a controlled setting, the way they are being developed, in public spaces and with little regulation, is clearly risky. Experts agree – one tech lecturer from the University College London described AV testing in the U.S. as “pretty reckless,” and said that companies are being left to decide what risks are acceptable in testing.
It will be interesting to see if GM meets its 2019 goal for Cruise Automation – which entails launching a large scale self-driving car service by year’s end. One source told Reuters in October that “nothing is on schedule,” at Cruise right now, with the company having missed recent mileage targets and other development goals.
(source: Gizmodo)
Comments
Self driving cars the public will accept are as far away as electrics, 50 years. Both technologies will be written off by 2021.
I don’t think these thechnologies will be written off. I do think the CAFE regulations from the Oblunder administration will be scaled back and self driving cars will be put under validation regulations.
Funny how the lawsuit about “the most well-known incident involving a self-driving car”. That the person behind the wheel was a felon who spent 4 year in prision, or, any description of car danage wasn’t mentioned.
There is also no mention of the number of deaths in a Tesla while under self driving mode or the lawsuits related to those deaths.
But there is plenty of details when referring to the GM vehicles fender benders!
Why is that? What was a popular term used to describe a great party back in the fifties?
Self-driving cars is a solution to a problem that does not exist. I think there can be safety advancements coming from the development of these AVs that can be applied to traditional vehicles, but Barra, Lutz, and others are plain delusional if they think that our infrastructure is ready for mass deployment of AVs, and that people are willingly going to turn in the keys to their pickups, SUVs and other modes of personal transportation to ride in pods like a parcel waiting to be delivered by UPS. I know that I am going to get a lot of static for this comment, but the best thing that could happen to GM is that this self-driving obsession of Barra’s blows up in her face and GM can get back to designing and building world-class vehicles.
I don’t understand why people have any reservations about autonomous vehicles. They are the future and will allow us to commute longer distances for work and travel for cheaper without long airport lines. They will allow families to share a single vehicle to send it home for pickup and drop off. The companies developing them are working hard to avoid any of the aforementioned accidents. I bet the number of accidents a human driver would have accrued over similar time periods and miles would be at least as high. And semiautonomous features like front collision prevention have probably already saved 100s of lives if not 1000s.