“The shuttle did what it was supposed to do, in that it’s sensors registered the truck and the shuttle stopped to avoid the accident,” the city said in a statement. “Unfortunately the delivery truck did not stop and grazed the front fender of the shuttle. Had the truck had the same sensing equipment that the shuttle has the accident would have been avoided.”
I drive a lot professionally, and on a daily basis I have to fix someone else´s mistake, and on a daily basis someone else will fix a mistake I make. The errors made by humans are a very large factor (probably more than 90%) of the accidents that we are involved in. At the same time the vast majority of would be accidents get fixed by our flexibility.
It makes me wonder if a human were at the wheel of that shuttle if the accident would have been avoided or not, it is not 100% clear cut to me that this accident would have happened in that scenario as well.
At a guess self driving cars will work very well with other self driving cars because they are hopefully never making any mistakes in the first place. But for now they will have to share the roads with us fallible humans and if that causes accidents like these to be far more frequent then that too is some kind of failure.
I guess that a lot (if not most) of the learning that Waymo and others are doing is exactly about how to deal with humans (car drivers, cyclists, pedestrians etc.)
The article doesn't say whether the delivery truck was already backing up when the shuttle stopped behind it. Or if there was another vehicle behind the shuttle. In the first case, the shuttle should have swerved. And in the second, it should have backed up if possible. Both are foreseeable edge cases.
However, if the shuttle was boxed in, it's not surprising that it just sat there. It's a hard problem.
> Had the truck had the same sensing equipment that the shuttle has the accident would have been avoided.
Do we really know that? I mean sensors fail. People who are supposed to maintain the vehicles get lazy or budgets get cut because investors want quarterly returns, etc.
It worked on the vehicle which had it, so with proper maintenance, it would have.
As for people getting lazy, you eventually charge it as attempted manslaughter or criminal negligence and things improve, the airline industry isn't a perfect example but it's a good one.
At this point many competitors have an incentive to provoke this type of crash and make negative news. They can do it for very cheap relative to what's at stake, given that most of the damages will paid by insurance. It doesn't even matter who is at fault. They can pay drivers to "find bugs" or test their competitor's car reaction to certain edge cases.
“The shuttle did what it was supposed to do, in that it’s sensors registered the truck and the shuttle stopped to avoid the accident,” the city said in a statement. “Unfortunately the delivery truck did not stop and grazed the front fender of the shuttle. Had the truck had the same sensing equipment that the shuttle has the accident would have been avoided.”