Google's driverless car has struck a bus in Mountain view, California, due to its failure to correctly judge the movement of a bus.
Google’s plans to launch a self-driving vehicle in the market have suffered from a setback. Up till this month, the American search engine developer positioned to claim that its driverless vehicles had driven over one million miles without any accident. The vehicles of the company got involved in a few accidents, but each of them had resulted due to other driver’s mistake – often a car behind rear end of the car.
On February 14, 2016, the US search company was troubled by the first accident in which its driverless car was at least partly responsible. According to the official report of Google to the regulatory bodies of California, its car drove in the right-most lane when an intersection approached and it encountered a sandbag blocking its route while forcing it to stop.
The car tried to join the sluggish traffic at its left so that it could go around the obstacle. It tried to merge in front of a bus while anticipating that the bus would slow down and allow it to go ahead. On the contrary, the bus continued to move and the vehicle smashed into its side to damage "the left front fender, the left front wheel, and one of the driver's side sensors."
Obviously, it is not great news for the Mountain View based organization, which, without doubts, enjoyed its ability to claim that its cars were never responsible for causing an accident. As it experienced accidents, this one looks minor. The company estimated that the bus was moving at a speed of 15mph when the accident took place while its vehicle was driving at a speed of 2mph. Fortunately, no one was hurt.
If one believes that the description of Google is accurate, it seems like this type of error is often made by human beings while misjudging probable reaction of another human drivers.
The masses are not probably accepting driverless vehicles to be as nice as their human counterparts. To convince consumers to allow computers drive them from one place to another, Google needs to make cars that drive in a much better manner than a human would have done. Vox does not have sufficient data yet to be sure that whether driverless vehicles are overall safe.
Google still needs to do some work. Reuters reported that the company said on March 29, 2016 it bears "some responsibility" of this recent accident involving its driverless car Lexus RX450h. After this, 15 passengers were moved to another bus.
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