Oh, the humanity: Google car self-drives into a bus…at 2 mph

Oh, the humanity: Google car self-drives into a bus…at 2 mph
It had to happen: a Google car crash where the company admits to some responsibility for the incident.

It had to happen: a Google car crash where the company admits to some responsibility for the incident. The Google car and a bus tried to merge into a single lane. Both vehicles and drivers apparently thought the other would give way and neither did. The mayhem that ensued took place at less than 2 miles per hour on the part of the Google car, and about 15 mph on the part of the bus. “We clearly bear some responsibility,” Google said in a statement. This is the first time Google has ever said its self-driving cars have been at fault.

Google has run thousands of simulations of the incident. As a result, Google has tweaked its autonomous-driving software with this additional bit of information to its algorithms: Buses and other large vehicles are less likely to give way to smaller vehicles.

(Image credit: Google Street View)

You won’t believe what happened next: the bus never stopped

Here’s what happened, based on the accident report(warning: PDF) Google filed with the California DMV and statements by the company: The fender bender took place Feb. 14 in Mountain View at El Camino Real and Castro Street (Google Street View image above). Google was testing a self-driving 2012 Lexus RX450h, with a driver behind the wheel. The Google Lexus was maneuvering around sandbags in a wide street lane and then, in autonomous mode, was centering itself in the lane when it struck the city bus, a 2002 New Flyer Series 2300 articulated bus. The self-driving Lexus and the driver both “believed the bus would slow or allow the Google [vehicle] to continue.”

As is said often on Facebook, you can’t believe what happens next: The bus didn’t stop or give way. (Oh, you probably can imagine.) The Google Lexus struck the bus, causing damage to the Lexus’s left front fender, left front road wheel, and a driver-side sensor. No one was injured.

“We clearly bear some responsibility,” Google said in a statement, “because if our car hadn’t moved, there wouldn’t have been a collision. That said, our test driver believed the bus was going to slow or stop to allow us to merge into the traffic, and that there would be sufficient space to do that.”

Software tweaks to prevent a repeat

Google unleashed its raw compute power and reviewed the accident “and thousands of variations on it in our simulator in detail and made refinements to our software. From now on, our cars will more deeply understand that buses (and other large vehicles) are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles, and we hope to handle situations like this more gracefully in the future.”

In other words, the Google cars will now bake into its sofware what most every driver knows in Boston, New York and many more don’t-give-the-other-guy-a-break cities: Big buses and trucks more often, it seems, want the right of way.

No third party has issued a finding of fault. The California DMV says it must receive reports of self-driving-vehicle accidents. But, “The DMV is not responsible for determining fault.”

What happens to plans to remove test car steering wheels

Google has been urging California to let it test self-driving vehicles that don’t have steering wheels, brake pedals, and gas pedals. There still would be a licensed driver on-board in case of problems, although what the driver could do is unclear. Turn down the radio and switch to the Lite FM channel before the cops show up? In November 2015, Google said its fleet had logged two million plus miles of autonomous and manual driving combined over six years. Of the 17 accidents to date then, a self-driving car was never the cause, Google said.