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.