Two self-driving cars involved in 'near miss' in California

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/26/google-delphi-two-self-driving-cars-near-miss

by edward • 11 years ago

25 57 11 years ago

theguardian.com

bartbes• 11 years ago

Should probably resync the title to the article, I'm guessing the guardian realised a "near miss" is a hit.

eterm2• 11 years ago

near miss

noun

noun: near miss; plural noun: near misses

    1. a narrowly avoided collision or other accident.
    "she had a near miss when her horse was nearly sucked into a dyke"

    2.   a bomb or shot that just misses its target.
    "he had escaped more than twenty near misses"

In no definition is "near miss" a hit, even taking it "literally" near is adjective for the noun miss, so it is a miss that is near. i.e, a miss where two bodies are close but don't hit.

slazaro• 11 years ago

It's one of those expressions that means the opposite of what you'd think if it was the first time you came across it. Like "could care less".

emilssolmanis• 11 years ago

In any definition, a near miss is a hit. A "near hit" would be what you're looking for...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDKdvTecYAM

mlonkibjuyhv• 11 years ago

But it's used in the sense "too close and not within acceptable margins". It's not a collision, but one might just as well think of it as a "hit" - someone messed up.

sjcsjc• 11 years ago

Reminds me of a trick question my late father used to ask us as kids: "would you rather be nearly saved or nearly drowned?"

robogimp3• 11 years ago

Ugh, this article sounds like the Lexus brand trying to latch on to the google self-driving hype train. Hey guys we are making a cool car too!

On a more important note: do we really want all the different tech companies and car manufacturers competing to build separate driverless software and standards? Looking at how well that worked out for online maps, doesn't make me feel safer.

Crito2• 11 years ago

Is it really reasonable to expect any automotive manufacturer who wants to remain relevant to not start working on self-driving cars?

You can't seriously expect this to be "just a google thing".

unfamiliar3• 11 years ago

I think they were more implying that the software that makes the decisions should be common to all of them. That way we don't allow individual car manufacturers to make potentially fatal mistakes when cutting corners with their software development. I think at the very least there should be a standardisation, so that there can be some communication between cars to aid in resolving traffic jams and other uses.

robogimp3• 11 years ago

I am not arguing against competition, I am saying it would be nice if all these cars inter-operated seamlessly, co-ordinating with eachother or centrally rather than each car having a different set of parameters trying to figure every other car out on the fly.

If the goal is safety then a wild west with every company setting standards for their own projects isn't going to be the best approach. If the goal is profit then Yee-Haa let the gold rush begin!

panic• 11 years ago

do we really want all the different tech companies and car manufacturers competing to build separate driverless software and standards?

Diversity is good. If everyone used the same software, it would all have the same flaws. Competition also provides an incentive to make the software better.

nothrabannosir2• 11 years ago

Do you mean that Lexus developed this on their own? Because they didn't; Google's initial autonomous car prototype was a Lexus. The dingy small ones are their new fleet, using different hardware but the same software.

Iow this was all Google.

robogimp3• 11 years ago

I didn't know that, thanks.

Tepix• 11 years ago

This brings up an interesting topic - who is liable when two self driving cars crash (without outside influence)? The car owners? The car manufacturer?

lucb1e• 11 years ago

Yeah, that's the question everyone has been debating for years now.

flashfabrixx• 11 years ago

”No collision took place.” ”In all cases, the self-driving prototype was not at fault, according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles and the companies.”

Source Article: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/26/us-autos-selfdrivi...

thescrewdriver2• 11 years ago

You're piecing together two unrelated sentences from the article to tell a different story...

"No collision took place" - refers to the two cars in this case.

"In all cases, the self-driving prototype was not at fault, according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles and the companies." - refers to previous crashes excluding the one being discussed in the article.

easytiger• 11 years ago

although the Delphi car was not actually in self-driving mode at the time, it was still required to report the accident under Californian law.

Err..

eterm2• 11 years ago

That's a different incident to the one in the headline isn't it?

masklinn2• 11 years ago

Yes, the one in the headline didn't result in an accident.

masklinn2• 11 years ago

Sounds like an excellent idea, otherwise there's the risk of companies not reporting any accident by just tagging them all as "manual driving" whether they were manually driven at the time or not.

jackgavigan• 11 years ago

The road this happened on frequently has three lanes on a carriageway. I can easily imagine a situation where the cars in question are in the left-most and right-most lanes, and both want to move into the middle lane. Both "see" that the lane is empty and both make their move at the same time. I wonder if these self-driving cars can "see" a turn signal two lanes away.

Of course, we don't know if the Google car was in self-driving mode or was being operated by a person. The article only tells one side of the story.

TickleSteve• 11 years ago

So I'm taking it that both cars behaved perfectly?

They realised a collision was imminent and took evasive action? Sounds like they got it right to me.

nothrabannosir2• 11 years ago

A self-driving Lexus operated by Google apparently cut off a self-driving Audi run by Delphi Automotive as it was trying to change lanes, causing it to take “appropriate action” to avoid a collision, said a Delphi executive.

John Absmeier, who was travelling in his company’s car at the time, said the Audi was forced to abort its lane change in the incident, which happened earlier this week.

I'm glad it was a robot, and not me driving that car. Not sure if I would have been able to change lanes that fast without causing an accident.

That's the issue: one of the robots forced another car to react quickly to avoid an accident. Had this been a human, it could have ended very differently.

kuschku• 11 years ago

So that’s why Google’s cars get rear-ended so often

Oletros• 11 years ago

It seems that there was no cut-off

From Ars Technica [0]

It wasn’t a 'near miss' as described in the Reuters story."

Instead, she explained how this was a normal scenario, and the Delphi car performed admirably.

"Our car did exactly what it was supposed to," she wrote. "Our car saw the Google car move into the same lane as our car was planning to move into, but upon detecting that the lane was no longer open it decided to terminate the move and wait until it was clear again."

[0] http://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/06/no-2-self-driving-cars-d...

coldtea3• 11 years ago

The real question is how did they get it to a collission situation in the first place.

Even assuming their evasive action was perfect, if instead of 2 s.d. cars was 1 normal car on the other side or some other obstacle (a building etc), getting on a collision course wouldn't be that safe...

EDIT: downvote? If someone disagress can also state why. Or am I shuttering the perfect technology dream?

noonespecial• 11 years ago

"Near" for the robot cars... or their human observers?

Zero-point-six-eight seconds, sir. For an android, that is nearly an eternity. --Data

nthState• 11 years ago

I was thinking the same thing

Shivetya• 11 years ago

So I guess the real issue is, we need a Federal standard with regards to self driving cars that they must talk to similar cars within a set radius.

Should be far easier that just driving down a crowded road. Effectively each car has the equivalent of a mac address and simply broadcasts its actions and any car listening within range responds appropriately.

cfallin• 11 years ago

An Ethernet segment per road, interesting -- gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "collision domain"!

anticon• 11 years ago

It's going to be great when these cars are around a bit more. You could have some pretty good fun trying to get one of the self driving cars to crash into you. Won't be that hard to do I'm sure.

calciphus• 11 years ago

Except that it'll have a mountain of sensors on it and will be able to show you were at fault.

connor43122• 11 years ago

Not to be cynical, but this is perfect publicity for Delphi Automotive. There appears to be no third-party confirmation of the incident, solely the say-so of the Delphi executive.

It would seem to me (given the low density of self-driving cars and their excellent track record) that the odds of Delphi wanting get in the news and bash a competitor at the same time is greater than the odds of two self-driving cars happening to cross paths and causing a "near-miss".

thescrewdriver2• 11 years ago

Both vehicles would be doing a ton of data collection, so it's hard to imagine a situation where false claims wouldn't easily be debunked with data/footage from the vehicles themselves.

connor43122• 11 years ago

It isn't possible for Google to provide footage showing it _not_ happening, and the release of footage from Delphi would be entirely on their own prerogative.

codeshaman• 11 years ago

I wouldn't mind living in a world were all news stories are like this - "Something bad almost happened, but it didn't, because the algorithms took care of it".

Back to the story, the article doesn't mention if the human drivers had to interfere to avoid collision. It would be quite pointless to have a self-driving car which you cannot trust and be always on the lookout to take over if it does something stupid.

viraptor2• 11 years ago

Algorithms preventing bad things? That was the whole premise of Minority Report, wasn't it?

maxerickson• 11 years ago

No, Minority Report had psychics (the title comes from having 3 of them, so when one of them sees something different than the other 2, there is a "Minority Report").

venomsnake2• 11 years ago

So the safety tech worked as expected. That is a great news. There are way more "near misses" everyday from human drivers.

Also seeing the "near miss" in the editorialized title - this Carlin quote is mandatory

“Here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it's a near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss. [WHAM! CRUNCH!] "Look, they nearly missed!" "Yes, but not quite.”

johnbaptiste• 11 years ago

Carlin is ignorant. The OED lists usage of 'near miss' going back to 1940 in a maritime context. It was not made up by the airlines. Even if it was, the phrase still makes sense. It's not 'nearly missed', it's 'a miss where the objects were near'.

Have you ever heard the phrase 'it's funny because it's true'? Well this isn't true, so I don't see Carlin as funny. He's just ignorant and angry.

arpa2• 11 years ago

I respectfully disagree. But that is just, like, my opinion, man.

venomsnake2• 11 years ago

The definition of miss implies that is was near. So to a point Carlin is right.

glaberficken• 11 years ago

What if one of the automated cars has to pick between swerving into another obstacle or keeping the collision course? (not even considering the moral implications of what that second obstacle might be...)

sangnoir• 11 years ago

Click-bait headline by Reuters (and Guardian). The Delphi spokesperson repudiated[1] the "near-miss" description.

"I was there for the discussion with Reuters about automated vehicles," she told Ars by e-mail. "The story was taken completely out of context when describing a type of complex driving scenario that can occur in the real world. Our expert provided an example of a lane change scenario that our car recently experienced which, coincidentally, was with one of the Google cars also on the road at that time. It wasn’t a 'near miss' as described in the Reuters story."

1. http://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/06/no-2-self-driving-cars-d...

jnevill• 11 years ago

Further, form that article:

Two self-driving cars involved in 'near miss' in California

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