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And yet after five years of testing, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, they just had one of their cars turn into the side of a 60 foot long bus, and that happened in their home city where 99% of their testing has been done. They will eventually have to do that much testing in every city and area they plan to operate these cars in. Because they have to map out the entire city and program the software for the traffic patterns and hazards. And all it will take to throw the whole system off, is one city worker deciding to put a couple of sand bags around a storm drain.
I’ve said it before, I'll say it again. Testing these cars in a city that gets only 60 days of light rain a year, is going to be a piece of cake, compared to testing them in cities that have snow on the ground half the year.
Self-driving cars are just not going to become common in any of our lifetimes. However some of the technology will end up in cars to aid drivers, but the cars are not going to be driverless.
Ok, we may be saying the same thing but I just want to clarify. The car went into the center lane, after letting a couple of cars pass, assuming the bus would yield to allow it to go around an obstruction (which I agree is faulty to assume). The Car did not run into the side of a vehicle that was already in the position. It was moving 15mph and the car was at 2mph glanced off the side when the bus didn't slow down which only caused minor damage to the google car, not to the bus. The bus was not sitting still when the accident took place.
Also, I'll place my money on these companies knowing what they're doing concerning the future of autonomous vehicles (Audi, BMW, Daimler, Ford, GM, Google, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Renault, Tesla, Toyota, Volvo, and Jaguar) which all plan on having their own autonomous vehicle on the road in 5 years (some sooner). That's outside what Google and Apple may be working on.
Ok, we may be saying the same thing but I just want to clarify. The car went into the center lane, after letting a couple of cars pass, assuming the bus would yield to allow it to go around an obstruction (which I agree is faulty to assume). The Car did not run into the side of a vehicle that was already in the position. It was moving 15mph and the car was at 2mph glanced off the side when the bus didn't slow down which only caused minor damage to the google car, not to the bus. The bus was not sitting still when the accident took place.
I din’t say the bus was not moving. Just for more clarification though. The Google car did not go to the center lane. Both vehicles were in the outside right lane. The Google car was in the right side of the right lane, and attempted to move to the center of the right lane, which was in the path of the bus traveling at 15 mph.
I don’t see how this is anything other then an epic FAIL for Google. The first mistake the Google car made was ever getting out of the center of the lane to begin with. That said, I have driven through that same intersection and did the same thing the Google car did, hundreds of times without incident. Everybody does it, so I can’t blame the Google car for doing it. However, sometimes when you move your car out of the flow of traffic, you get blocked, and you might have to wait a while to reenter the flow. The Google car should not have expected traffic to just stop to let it back in. That’s a major flaw in the software.
From what I read, Google is going to reprogram the software to deal with “bully” bus drivers. They should be reprograming it to deal with basic road rules.
Still the google car was only going 2 miles per hour , which is too slow , and in many areas the bus has the right of way and cars have to stop and let the bus merge into the left lane after a pick up , ....But this google car move out of his lane and in the path to the bus , did the google car use the signals light , which would be illegal if it did not use the lights to go around the obstruction to then make a right hand turn ..... the google car should have been busted and send to a compound as the driver left the scene of the accident
That's rather odd. Never heard of a bus having right of way over normal traffic, not a lot of busses in my area though. In this case it did have the right of way as it occupied the lane the Google car was trying to merge into, doesn't really matter that it was a bus, any vehicle in its position would have had the right of way.
In minnesota, when a bus is pulled over at a bus stop, and is then taking off to merge onto the street again, it does have the right away . theirs even a big sign that says "yeild" on the back.
This is my reason (Traffic fatalities by year from 1990 to 2014 (nearly 1,000,000 deaths) if Autonomous vehicles can even cut this in half then it's well worth it but we all know the real goal behind this is not to just cut this number in half but to get as close as possible to eliminating it.
What's next on your "have to get rid of to protect us from ourselves" list, guns or swimming pools?
In minnesota, when a bus is pulled over at a bus stop, and is then taking off to merge onto the street again, it does have the right away . theirs even a big sign that says "yeild" on the back.
Which is not really relevant, since the bus was not merging into traffic. It was the Google car that was merging into the path of the bus.
Anyway the California law allowing transit busses to have yield signs, expired in 2004. So this bus sould not have had a yield sign.
... “tricky set of circumstances” that’s helped it “improve an important skill for navigating similar roads.”
The company echoes its report to the DMV, saying that the car and the test driver both predicted that the bus would yield to the vehicle, because they were ahead of it.
There's nothing tricky about it, they didn't yield the right of way to the bus. Never assume anything, just fricken wait your turn.
Quote:
And we can imagine the bus driver assumed we were going to stay put,” the report says. “Unfortunately, all these assumptions led us to the same spot in the lane at the same time,” adding that this isn’t a situation unique to self-driving vehicles, but a type of misunderstanding that humans encounter on the road every day .
OF COURSE the bus driver would think that, he had the right of way. There's no "misunderstanding" except that apparently Google doesn't know the rules of the road.
Quote:
"From now on, our cars will more deeply understand that buses (and other large vehicles) are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles, and we hope to handle situations like this more gracefully in the future,” the report says.
A LOT of people are not going to stop short to let you cut them off in traffic! What world do the people at Google live in? As for gracefully, they didn't handle this gracefully at all. They practically blamed it all on the bus driver without coming out and saying it was the fault of the bus driver. What a bunch of tool sheds.
The googlemobile had a safety driver who agreed with the car that the bus would yield. The safety driver made the same decision that the car did. Both turned out to be wrong.
In the real world to come this would simply not be an issue. The coming communication package would have made it clear. The Bus would have broadcast it was not stopping and the Google would have stopped. This one is childish simple to avoid. Vehicle close to each other must communicate.
It is amazing to see the degree to which people avoid the obvious and unstoppable. The autonomous nehicle will hit the road by 2020 and will completely dominate by 2030. We will not keep killing people with the alternative.
I still think trucks first as that is the obvious market...long haul trucks. Simpler problem and bigger payoff. Just a matter of when the developers get around to making money rather than doing the right thing.
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