Google Blames Self Driving Crashes All On Human Error - But Would A REAL Driver Have Avoided Some Of Them?

As much as we all love having control over our vehicles on the open road, autonomous cars are the way of the future. Majority of people do not car about that feeling that we get from driving. Good case in point is look at how many entry level cars have small engines and automatic, but have the latest and greatest tech integration.

What I could eventually see is a hybrid approach. Having lanes or sections of highway that are autonomous only, as well as crowded sections like city centers. Perhaps even different times like rush hour to reduce congestion.

Please note that an article posted on AutoSpies yesterday states that *ALL* (100%) of the collisions involving autonomous cars were the other guy's fault.

To answer your question of whether a human driver might be able to avoid that: How does a human driver prevent someone from rear-ending you at a stop-light? An autonomous car, no matter how perfect, cannot change the driving skills and habits of other (bad) drivers.

If you want to discuss how these autonomous vehicle accidents could have been avoided, we must shift our focus to the bad human drivers in their manually piloted vehicles who caused these accidents by running into these Google autonomous cars. Were they distracted by the vehicle's different look, became inattentive, and then cause a collision, sort of like the boob ads on the side of truck that caused over 500 accidents in Russia? That's where our investigation should start.

So you're saying they gave the google car so much attention that they stopped paying attention? Maybe you should google it.

Yes, None of the accidents were Google's fault.

And I do not really see how a rear end could be avoided UNLESS the Google car braked hard for a yellow light when a human might have made a judgement call to pass through under yellow. THAT might have been a factor, but we do not know the circumstances.

Also Google cars do not go once the light is green. They pause to allow a potential red light runner to pass through. This is a buffer for limited peripheral capabilities. With a significant pause i could see a bump from the rear if a driver reacted to the other cars moving while the Google car sat.

While I believe for certain that the Google cars are safer than some of the drivers I have seen. The jury is out on if they are safer than the average driver.

Yes they are safer than the average driver. Enough with this 009. In 60 years when most of us are gone and 30000 deaths per year from auto accidents is a thing of the past, people are going to laugh at the fact that we even questioned if computers were safer drivers than us. There was a time when man didn't want to give up his loyal horse for a greased up, accident prone machine called an automobile too.