Wired has an amusing article on the difficulty of building self-driving cars, as evidenced by the fact that humans keep crashing into them. The story pegs on a Cruise-on-Cruise collision in which a Cruise safety driver accidentally and manually rear-ended a Cruise vehicle in autonomous mode.
“On June 11, a self-driving Cruise Chevrolet Bolt had just made a left onto San Francisco’s Bryant Street, right near the General Motors-owned company’s garage. Then, whoops: Another self-driving Cruise, this one being driven by a Cruise human employee, thumped into its rear bumper. Yes, very minor Cruise on Cruise violence.”
This prompted me to go digging through the California DMV’s Report of Traffic Collision Involving an Autonomous Vehicle (OL 316). There have been 79 such reports so far. Here are some of the latest:
Fore!
Beware Squirrel
Drifting
Forward!
Fortunately, none of these collisions was especially serious, unlike a few other incidents that have been in the news. But they do serve to highlight just how often human drivers cause collisions. Watch out!
David Silver 