According to reports, on Friday, Sept. 23, a Lexus vehicle upgraded with Google self-driving technology was struck by a car that ran a red light in Mountain View, California.
Google Autonomous Car Crashes
According to Fortune, some analysts believe that this might be the worst crash involving Google's driverless vehicles. However, on the good side, in this road accident there were no reported injuries.
A photo of the crash aftermath posted by the online publication 9TO5Google shows the Interstate Batteries van apparently at fault. For at least six seconds the self-driving vehicle's light was green before the "car entered the intersection," according to a statement from Google.
According to Engadget, Google's autonomous cars do not have a flawless safetly record but this latest road accident shows clearer than ever that human mistakes and careless human drivers remain the greater threat. This seems, however, the worst incident to date involving Google's autonomous cars. In previous road accidents the crashes have usually involved human drivers rear-ending the Google self-driving cars at low speed.
Google stated that it will likely release full details on the collision in its autonomous car report scheduled for the end of the month. The crash differs significantly from recent incidents involving Tesla vehicles that were driving in Autopilot mode.
Those crashes suggested some failure of the vehicles' detection systems that prevented them to properly read and respond to their environment. In the case of Google's autonomous vehicle crash it is hard to lay much blame on the self-driving system for being struck by the van running a red light.
The road accident involving Google's autonomous car shows instead a much different issue for self-driving cars. The problem is here that for decades to come these technologically advanced cars will still have to continue sharing the road with fallible human drivers.
A recent Goldman Sachs report suggest that at current ownership models and replacement rates it could be as far as 2060 before the American auto fleet reaches full autonomy.
