In response to reports that their self-driving cars have not been totally free from accidents, Google has created a webpage where it will publish monthly reports detailing all of the accidents that its self-driving cars are involved in.
The first report [PDF] includes summaries of all accidents since the start of the Google X project in 2009:
The report for May showed Google cars had been involved in 12 accidents since it first began testing its self-driving cars in 2009, mostly involving rear-ending. Google said one of its vehicles was rear-ended at a stoplight in California on Thursday, bringing the total count to 13 accidents.
"That could mean that the vehicles tend to stop more quickly than human drivers expect," public interest group Consumer Watchdog said. The group called for more details on the accidents, including statements from witnesses and other drivers.
None of these accidents were caused by a fault with the car, Google said.
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Monday June 08 2015, @02:29PM
According to their report, their cars have driven a bit over a million miles in autonomous mode, and nearly 800K in manual mode.
That manual-mode number seems rather high. If that's a realistic representation of how often you'll have to engage manual mode in regular driving, that means the autonomous mode will only be working 55% of the time.
Is there something inflating that number? One of the accidents was from "personal use" of the car - is that mileage counted as testing? Do they drive to the test area in manual mode?
What I'd like to see is a breakdown of "manual override" miles (where the vehicle was in autonomous mode but needed human intervention) versus "manual non-testing" miles (where the vehicle wasn't supposed to be in autonomous mode). That would give us a better idea of how often autonomous mode fails (it's obviously a clean failure mode, since it hasn't caused accidents, but it's still a failure mode).
(Score: 3, Funny) by Nerdfest on Monday June 08 2015, @02:38PM
Perhaps it was where the 'operator' got annoyed at it driving so cautiously and wanted to speed a bit, pass one of those annoying people who tap their brakes constantly, or continually change speeds randomly on an open highway. For future automate vehicles I propose that they let the car do the driving while the human operates the weapons systems.