
Google’s self-driving car has been involved in its worst crash yet - obi1kenobi
http://thenextweb.com/google/2016/09/26/googles-self-driving-car-involved-worst-crash-yet/
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danielvf
TLDR: A van ran a red light and hit a Google car. Nothing really to see here.

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gumby
Actually the important part is buried: the human saw the van and tried to
brake, but was too slow.

We can certainly imagine that future AVs will look further "ahead" sideways
for this kind of thing and be less prone to the accident.

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JoeAltmaier
It was hit in the side, toward the rear. Possibly if the driver had _not hit
the brakes_ the accident would have been avoided?

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angryasian
agree, its possible if the google car had sped up it could have cleared the
intersection.

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comex
No official accident report yet, it seems:

[https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/autonomousveh_ol316)

From the article:

> The car was operating in its autonomous mode at the time of the crash, but
> that didn’t stop the human driver from slamming on the breaks when he
> spotted the oncoming van. Unfortunately, his reaction was a little too slow.

Is this just speculation, or is it confirmed that the car did not act
optimally by itself once the van could be seen running the red light?

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duskwuff
Or is it possible that the car would have accelerated to avoid the van if the
driver had not intervened?

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kazinator
Is this _that_ "El Camino Real" that is the subject of an old CS geek joke,
involving "El Camino Bignum"?

[edit]

It's in the Jagon File:

[http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/E/El-Camino-
Bignum.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/E/El-Camino-Bignum.html)

"When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long road
El Camino Real was. Making a pun on ‘real’, he started calling it ‘El Camino
Double Precision’ — but when the hacker was told that the road was hundreds of
miles long, he renamed it ‘El Camino Bignum’, and that name has stuck."

That hacker was ESR himself.

