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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (March 23, 2016)
March 23, 2016 The Skanner Page 9 Business News Autonomous Cars Aren’t Perfect, But How Safe Must They Be? Tom Krisher Justin Pritchard Associated Press DETROIT — As auton- omous car technology rapidly progresses, mak- ers of the cars face the difficult question of how safe they must be before they’re ready to move people on highways and “ selves almost 1.5 million miles, with a person as backup in the driver seat. The company also uses a simulator to test the cars in a variety of scenarios. Other companies such as Nissan, software firm Cruise Automation and parts suppliers Bosch and Delphi also are test- ing on public roads. Test We should be concerned about automated vehicles. But we should be terrified about today’s drivers city streets. Right now, companies such as Google, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz are testing the cars in a small number of cities to demonstrate they can be safer than human drivers. They also must figure out what level of risk is acceptable to both government regulators and a potentially skepti- cal public. Government statistics show that human mis- takes are responsible for 94 percent of the 33,000 traffic fatalities each year. Autonomous cars won’t get drowsy, dis- tracted or drunk, so in theory they could elimi- nate those mistakes and save an estimated 31,000 lives a year. But as a Valentine’s Day fender-bender involving a Google autonomous Lexus and a public bus shows, cars that drive themselves can make mistakes. “We cannot expect any technology, any solu- tion to be perfect all the time,” says Raj Rajkumar, a computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has led autonomous vehicle research for 15 years. “We live in a very uncertain world where lots of things happen.” Given that, regulators and would-be passengers may have to accept that the cars will cause a lim- ited number of crashes, including deadly ones, if overall they save thou- sands of lives. “We should be con- cerned about automated vehicles,” says Bryant Walker Smith, a Univer- sity of South Carolina law professor who stud- ies the technology. “But we should be terrified about today’s drivers.” Google is testing a fleet of 56 autonomous cars on the streets of Moun- tain View, California; Austin, Texas; and Kirk- land, Washington. The cars have driven them- cities also include San Francisco, Las Vegas and Pittsburgh. Chris Urmson, head of Google’s self-driving car program, wrote in a January blog that during the past two years, driv- ers took control 13 times when its cars likely would have hit some- thing. He noted that the rate of hu- man intervention is dropping and he expects it to keep falling. In the bus crash, Google for the first time admitted its car was at least partly responsi- ble. The computer and human driver assumed the bus would yield as the car moved around sandbags. Instead, the bus kept going and the car hit its side. Google has updated its soft- ware. In about a dozen other crashes on city streets, Google blamed the hu- man driver of the other vehicle. Google wants to make cars available to the public around the end of 2019, assuming its data shows the time is right for deployment. A Virginia Tech Uni- versity study commis- sioned by Google found that the company’s au- tonomous cars crashed 3.2 times per million miles compared with 4.2 times for human driv- See CARS on page 10 AP PHOTO/TONY AVELAR, FILE Regulators consider possibility that some self-driving cars will still crash despite best efforts In this Wednesday, May 13, 2015, file photo, Google’s self-driving Lexus car drives along street during a demonstration at Google campus on in Mountain View, Calif. As Google cars encounter more and more of the obstacles and conditions that befuddle human drivers, the autonomous vehicles are likely to cause more accidents, such as a recent low-speed collision with a bus.
