14 DAY TRIAL // Last year, Google made a huge splash with its futuristic-sounding computer driven cars. At a time, this was herald as a a sign that Google was still engaged in long-term research and that the company hadn't lost its edge.
Now, one of the robot cars has been involved in an accident and everyone started seeing this as proof that self-driving cars are a bad idea and will never work. You know, just like regular cars were never going to catch on, a century ago.
Google then came out and said that the accident happened while the car was driven by a human, i.e. was in manual mode, which Google says it has confirmed through the logs each car has.
"Safety is our top priority. One of our goals is to prevent fender-benders like this one, which occurred while a person was manually driving the car," a Google spokesperson said.
There's no way to know what really happened, without seeing the police report, and some eye witness claims have come forward saying that there were more cars involved in the crash.
Regardless, if we are to take Google's word on it, the software was not involved in any way and this is a complete non-issue.
When Google revealed the program, it said that the cars had traveled over 140,000 miles without incident and that the only small accidents that did happen were caused by the human drivers.
Even if the software had been at fault, it's no reason to attack self-driving cars as a concept. Any software will have faults and self-driving cars, once will become prevalent, will have accidents, some small, some more serious.
The purpose of self-driving cars is not to get the accident rate to zero, which is impossible, but to reduce the rate of accidents which they will undoubtedly do, making it safer to ride in a self-driven car than in one with a human driver.