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Google Notes Self-Driving Accidents After AP Reports Them | DrivingSales News

Google Notes Self-Driving Accidents After AP Reports Them

May 12, 2015 2 Comments

Google grabbed the headlines in the spring of 2014 with their self-driving car. Google took riders for test-drives and revealed how many miles in testing they have traveled. What they have recently revealed in a blog post is that during their 1.7 million miles of self-driving tests, they’ve been involved in 11 accidents.

Google released a long and detailed summation of its self-driving car testing as told by none other than Chris Urmson, the director of the self-driving car project at Google. In the blog posting at Medium.com’s backchannel, Urmson explained the self-driving cars did get involved in accidents. However, those accidents, he explained were the fault of humans and not the self-driving cars in self-driving mode. He said the accidents that occurred were minor, resulting in no injuries and only minor vehicle damage. Urmson points out that Google employees have seen some very distracted drivers. From reading books to even playing the trumpet, Urmson says that humans can be very distracted drivers. He also pointed out that 660,000 people are driving in the USA at any given time and doing so using a distracting device.

While Urmson’s report is open to the fact that 11 self-driving accidents did occur, including being rear ended 7 times, the timing of the admission is interesting. Google’s posting comes only after a report from the Associated Press. Part of an AP report on this issue reads, “The company released the number Monday after The Associated Press reported that Google had notified California of three collisions involving its self-driving cars since September, when reporting all accidents became a legal requirement as part of the permits for the tests on public roads.”

The question is whether or not Google was trying to cover something up or simply not publicize accidents.

Urmson wrote that all of the accidents were the result of human error, however can that statement be independently verified? Trust of self-driving technology is going to be huge. It will take a lot for humans to hand the keys and life over to a computer. It simply doesn’t inspire consumer confidence that it took an AP report to get Google to release their accident figures.

What do you think that this crossroads of the AP and Google does for self-driving cars? If self-driving machines are the future, how transparent does Google need to be to help consumer confidence? Finally, what does this Google crash report mean in terms of accident data for automakers

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    Dave Martinson
    Dave Martinson

    You make a good point, John. It may have just been a business decision to not disclose data. The tough part is that Google is reporting that the accidents are only the fault of human drivers, however it’s quite difficult to verify that information. Trust is a major obstacle for self-driving cars and any computer caused accidents would be chaotic for the Google program and future of self-driving tech. As you say, it would be a scandal.

    I don’t know, it sounds like a pretty normal business decision to me to not disclose the accident data. Of course, there are different perspectives on how transparent companies should be, but you can see how if Google “knew” (unverified) the accidents weren’t caused by the self-driven car, that may have given them pause to release that information. But if this were happening often, and it was often the fault of the self-driven car, this would be a whole different story – a scandal even. As it is, seems like maybe they got caught with their pants down, but on their part, the data isn’t particularly embarrassing. I wonder how many human-driven accidents there are for every 1.7 million miles?