Yahoo Autos Self-Driving Cars Keep Getting Into Hit-and-Runs — As Victims
There were 36 hit-and-run incidents involving self-driving cars in 2022.
Proponents of autonomous vehicles keep telling us they’re the future of transport — safer than human drivers, more reliable, and a solution to all the time we waste stuck in traffic. But before they can become a silver bullet to all our transport woes, they’re going to have to get used to that other menace on the road: human drivers.
In case you missed it:
Study Explores How Long Electric Vehicle Batteries Really Last
Fordlandia: Henry Ford’s Abandoned Company Town in the Amazon Rainforest
This is a harsh lesson some autonomous taxi services are learning as they put their self-driving cars to work in states like California. That’s because these autonomous taxis are increasingly ending up in hit-and-run accidents as they traverse cities like San Francisco. The twist here is that the autonomous cars are usually the victim, not the perpetrator of the crash.
Read more
According to a new report from NBC News, cars from the likes of Waymo and Cruise, as well as other tech firms like Apple and Amazon-backed Zoox, are increasingly ending up in hit-and-run crashes caused by human drivers. One example from the report saw a Chevrolet Bolt from GM-backed Cruise tangle with an Infiniti Q50 performing donuts on the streets of San Francisco. The driver of the Infiniti fled the scene, leaving the Cruise car battered and bruised.
Show me the Waymo to go home.
This is an increasingly common occurrence in San Francisco, NBC reports, as there were 36 hit-and-run crashes between self-driving cars and human drivers in 2022. So far this year, there have been seven such crashes where the human driver fled the scene. NBC reports:
The hit-and-runs pose a problem for driverless technology and its future: Even when self-driving cars are programmed to do everything right, it can be hard to avoid the mistakes of human drivers.
So far, at least three incidents between self-driving cars and human drivers have resulted in injuries to the autonomous car’s occupants. NBC reports that in all three of the reported cases, “the drivers of the other cars left the scene without exchanging information.”
In one of the reported cases, a Cruise vehicle in autonomous mode was rear-ended twice by a Honda driver in Golden Gate Park. The car was stopped at a red light with two Cruise employees inside “when the Honda driver bumped it from behind,” then, the report continues, “the Honda driver reversed backward several feet, stopped and drove forward again, making contact with the Cruise vehicle a second time.”
