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According to an article by the AP - via an ad-free site several of the self driving cars licensed to drive in California have been involved in accidents.
Most are slow speed accidents, apparently with no injuries.
Four of the nearly 50 self-driving cars now rolling around California have gotten into accidents since September, when the state began issuing permits for companies to test them on public roads. Two accidents happened while the cars were in control; in the other two, the person who still must be behind the wheel was driving, a person familiar with the accident reports told The Associated Press.
Three involved Lexus SUVs that Google Inc. outfitted with sensors and computing power in its aggressive effort to develop "autonomous driving," a goal the tech giant shares with traditional automakers. The parts supplier Delphi Automotive had the other accident with one of its two test vehicles. Google and Delphi said their cars were not at fault in any accidents, which the companies said were minor.
Neither the companies involved, nor the State of California will release details of these accidents, which rankles some critics.
Four accidents involving these 50 cars in 8 months may seem a little high. Google's 23 cars have driven 140,000 miles in that time and racked up 3 accidents all by them selves. That is an order of magnitude higher than the National Transportation Safety Board's figures of 0.3 per 100,000 for non injury accidents. However the NTSB doesn't collect all fender bender accidents.
The article says that none of the other states that permit self driving cars have any record of accidents.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gnuman on Monday May 11 2015, @06:59PM
However the NTSB doesn't collect all fender bender accidents.
Unlike for self-driving cars, including cars not under the actual control of the software.
Anyway, there are expected to be at least minor issues on initial experimentation. I still prefer self-driving car safety over any texting "driver" I see out there. Self-driving cars can only improve.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday May 11 2015, @07:05PM
Unreported fender benders are estimated to be approximately 55% of vehicular accidents, so that isn't exactly vindication, but I largely agree.
Maybe a skilled, attentive human driver could have avoided the situations that lead to those accidents, but skilled, attentive drivers aren't exactly the norm.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday May 12 2015, @12:19AM
If you take the federal numbers of .3, and double them to account for only 55% of them being reported, you still end up with .6 per 140,000 miles driven strictly by humans.
That mental exercise serves two purposes:
1) It points out that the 23 google cars experience minor accidents something approaching 5 times more often than human driven cars.
2) It points out that sufficiently skilled and attentive drivers ARE pretty much the norm.
That we have all seen the occasional texter driving and yet not one in 10000 of us** have actually seen a texter crash, suggests that texting while driving is more likely just people READING while driving, rather than actually texting. Because it its actually texting, you would have to come to the conclusion that texting while driving is a LOT less deadly than we are lead to believe.
** numbers pulled straight from my ass. Prove me wrong!
Hell, I've seen cops texting while driving!!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Tuesday May 12 2015, @08:25AM
They also only looked at data from California. They state that there have been no other accidents in other states that permit self driving cars, so how many cars in total are on the roads? They say that the amount of incidents is an order of magnitude higher than overall incidents, but they only have 48 of all the cars on the road in the sample group, because they chose to narrow the selection to California only.
Where's the rest of the data?