Many companies believe that self-driving vehicles are the future — but they need to stop getting into accidents first.
Just two hours after a much-celebrated autonomous bus was unveiled in Las Vegas this week, it promptly got into a collision with a semi-truck.
Luckily, nobody was injured, and the fender-bender only caused minor damage. According to reports, the human driver of the semi was at fault in the collision, and received a citation for illegal backing.
Still, the inauspicious start was a stark reminder that self-driving technology is far from perfect. While there’s no way of knowing for sure, it’s entirely possible that if a human driver had been at the wheel of the city bus, he could have taken some action to avoid the collision.
“The Metropolitan Police Department said officers responded at 12:07 p.m. to an accident involving the shuttle and a delivery truck on the 100 block of South Sixth Street, near Fremont Street,” reported the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
TRENDING: Fusion GPS Partner Refuses the 5th, Strikes Deal to Testify
“Police briefly closed a southbound lane of South Sixth Street from Fremont Street to Carson Avenue as they investigated,” the newspaper continued.
The robotic bus which was involved in the traffic accident is designed to hold about a dozen passengers, and ferry them around the city using GPS and other advanced sensors.
“The shuttle, which launched Wednesday, can talk to traffic signals and share the road with other vehicles while stopping for pedestrians,” the Review-Journal explained. “It is offering free rides for up to 11 passengers as it travels a half-mile loop in the Fremont East neighborhood.”
Autonomous vehicles have been taking to the streets in growing numbers recently. In September, the U.S. House passed the “Self Drive Act,” which eases regulations on those types of cars and paves the way for some 100,000 test vehicles to be placed on the roads annually.
The bill still has to become a law, but its support in the Senate is a sign that lawmakers are finally warming to the idea of the futuristic technology.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first bus accident to involve a driverless vehicle. Last year, a public bus in California was involved in an collision, but it was the other car in the crash that was autonomous.
“Google accepted at least some responsibility for the collision, which occurred on Valentine’s Day when one of the Lexus SUVs it has outfitted with sensors and cameras hit the side of the bus near the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California,” reported the The Associated Press.
“No one was injured, according to an accident report Google wrote and submitted to the California Department of Motor Vehicles,” said the AP.
Of course, no world-changing technology was ever developed without a few bumps along the way. However, rushing into a new era that takes the human out of the driver’s seat may not be the smartest approach.
In the coming years, Americans will have to decide just how comfortable they are handing the keys over to robots.
With that shift, practical and legal questions also emerge: Who is to blame if a self-driving car causes a serious accident? Can a programmer a thousand miles away be liable for a missed stop light? Will ethanol-fueled robot cars technically be drunk drivers?
Technology marches on. Driverless cars may be the inevitable future, but that doesn’t mean Americans can’t put the brakes on them… at least until all the bugs are worked out.
H/T Breitbart
If you find this technology interesting — or terrifying — please press “Share on Facebook” now!
Where do you think machine-driven cars will end up in society? Scroll down to comment below!
via Conservative Tribune
Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: http://ift.tt/2gEOIzE