On Valentine’s Day, there was crash in which a self-driving Google robot car sideswiped a bus at around 15 mph. Consumer Watchdog says this incident demonstrates the need for a police investigation and the release of technical data and video associated with the crash.
Google’s account of the crash was posted on the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ website and the self-driving robot car appears to have been at fault.
Consumer Watchdog petitioned the DMV on Sept. 24, 2015, calling for every robot car accident to be investigated by police and accompanied by a release of technical and video data associated with the crash. The nonprofit nonpartisan group has advocated for DMV rules, currently in draft form, that require robot cars to have the ability for a human driver to take over. Google has opposed those rules.
“This accident is more proof that robot car technology is not ready for autopilot and a human driver needs to be able to takeover when something goes wrong. Google’s one-paragraph account of what caused it to drive into a bus is not good enough to inform new rules of the road for robot cars,” said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s privacy project director. “The police should be called to the site of every robot car crash and all technical data and video associated with the accident must be made public.”
According to the report on the DMV’s website, the car had moved into the right side of the lane at a traffic light to make a right turn on red, but was blocked by sandbags. The traffic light turned green and several cars started through the intersection. The Google robot car moved back toward the center of the lane to go around the sandbags and sideswiped the bus, which was passing, the report says.
Chris Urmson, the head of Google’s self-driving car project, said in a brief interview that he believes the Lexus was moving before the bus started to pass. “We saw the bus, we tracked the bus, we thought the bus was going to slow down, we started to pull out, there was some momentum involved,” Urmson told The Associated Press. He acknowledged that Google’s car did have some responsibility but said it was “not black and white.”
Consumer Watchdog said that the crash was further proof that Google’s self-driving robot cars cannot reliably cope with everyday ordinary driving situations. In early January, Google released a DMV-required “disengagement report” revealing that the self-driving technology failed 341 times in 15 months. The autonomous robot technology turned over control 272 times and the test driver felt compelled to intervene 69 times.
The California DMV’s proposed regulations for the deployment of self-driving vehicles require that there be a driver be wheel capable of taking control. The National Highway Safety and Traffic Administration has recently said that a self-driving system can count as the driver of an autonomous robot car.
Consumer Watchdog called on Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx and NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind to put safety first and require a driver behind the wheel as national self-driving car policies are developed.
Click here to view the report.
