The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car 
 
 After 1.7 million miles we’ve learned a lot — not just about our system but how humans drive, too. 
 
 Chris Urmson Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 11, 2015 Unlisted 
 
 About 33,000 people die on America’s roads every year. That’s why so much of the enthusiasm for self-driving cars has focused on their potential to reduce accident rates. As we continue to work toward our vision of fully self-driving vehicles that can take anyone from point A to point B at the push of a button, we’re thinking a lot about how to measure our progress and our impact on road safety. 
 
 One of the most important things we need to understand in order to judge our cars’ safety performance is “baseline” accident activity on typical suburban streets. Quite simply, because many incidents never make it into official statistics, we need to find out how often we can expect to get hit by other drivers. Even when our software and sensors can detect a sticky situation and take action earlier and faster than an alert human driver, sometimes we won’t be able to overcome the realities of speed and distance; sometimes we’ll get hit just waiting for a light to change. And that’s important context for communities with self-driving cars on their streets; although we wish we could avoid all accidents, some will be unavoidable. 
 
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 The most common accidents our cars are likely to experience in typical day to day street driving — light damage, no injuries — aren’t well understood because they’re not reported to police. Yet according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data, these incidents account for 55% of all crashes. It’s hard to know what’s really going on out on the streets unless you’re doing miles and miles of driving every day. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing with our fleet of 20+ self-driving vehicles and team of safety drivers, who’ve driven 1.7 million miles (manually and autonomously combined). The cars have self-driven nearly a million of those miles, and we’re now averaging around 10,000 self-driven miles a week (a bit less than a typical American driver logs in a year), mostly on city streets. 
 
 In the spirit of helping all of us be safer drivers, we wanted to share a few patterns we’ve seen. A lot of this won’t be a surprise, especially if you already know that driver error causes 94% of crashes. 
 
 If you spend enough time on the road, accidents will happen whether you’re in a car or a self-driving car. Over the 6 years since we started the project, we’ve been involved in 11 minor accidents (light damage, no injuries) during those 1.7 million miles of autonomous and manual driving with our safety drivers behind the wheel, and not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident. 
 
 Rear-end crashes are the most frequent accidents in America, and often there’s little the driver in front can do to avoid getting hit; we’ve been hit from behind seven times, mainly at traffic lights but also on the freeway. We’ve also been side-swiped a couple of times and hit by a car rolling through a stop sign. And as you might expect, we see more accidents per mile driven on city streets than on freeways; we were hit 8 times in many fewer miles of city driving. All the crazy experiences we’ve had on the road have been really valuable for our project. We have a detailed review process and try to learn something from each incident, even if it hasn’t been our fault. 
 
 Not only are we developing a good understanding of minor accident rates on suburban streets, we’ve also identified patterns of driver behavior (lane-drifting, red-light running) that are leading indicators of significant collisions. Those behaviors don’t ever show up in official statistics, but they create dangerous situations for everyone around them. 
 
 Lots of people aren’t paying attention to the road. In any given daylight moment in America, there are 660,000 people behind the wheel who are checking their devices instead of watching the road. Our safety drivers routinely see people weaving in and out of their lanes; we’ve spotted people reading books, and even one playing a trumpet. A self-driving car has people beat on this dimension of road safety. With 360 degree visibility and 100% attention out in all directions at all times; our newest sensors can keep track of other vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians out to a distance of nearly two football fields. 
 
 Intersections can be scary places. Over the last several years, 21% of the fatalities and about 50% of the serious injuries on U.S. roads have involved intersections. And the injuries are usually to pedestrians and other drivers, not the driver running the red light. This is why we’ve programmed our cars to pause briefly after a light turns green before proceeding into the intersection — that’s often when someone will barrel impatiently or distractedly through the intersection. 
 
 In this case, a cyclist (the light blue box) got a late start across the intersection and narrowly avoided getting hit by a car making a left turn (the purple box entering the intersection) who didn’t see him and had started to move when the light turned green. Our car predicted the cyclist’s behavior (the red path) and did not start moving until the cyclist was safely across the intersection. 
 
 Turns can be trouble. We see people turning onto, and then driving on, the wrong side of the road a lot — particularly at night, it’s common for people to overshoot or undershoot the median. 
 
 In this image you can see not one, but two cars (the two purple boxes on the left of the green path are the cars you can see in the photo) coming toward us on the wrong side of the median; this happened at night on one of Mountain View’s busiest boulevards. 
 
 Other times, drivers do very silly things when they realize they’re about to miss their turn. 
 
 A car (the purple box touching the green rectangles with an exclamation mark over it) decided to make a right turn from the lane to our left, cutting sharply across our path. The green rectangles, which we call a “fence,” indicate our car is going to slow down to avoid the car making this crazy turn. 
 
 And other times, cars seem to behave as if we’re not there. In the image below, a car in the leftmost turn lane (the purple box with a red fence through it) took the turn wide and cut off our car. In this case, the red fence indicates our car is stopping and avoiding the other vehicle. 
 
 These experiences (and countless others) have only reinforced for us the challenges we all face on our roads today. We’ll continue to drive thousands of miles so we can all better understand the all too common incidents that cause many of us to dislike day to day driving — and we’ll continue to work hard on developing a self-driving car that can shoulder this burden for us. 
 
 Chris Urmson is director of Google’s self-driving car program. 
 
 Follow Backchannel: Twitter | Facebook ||||| Eleven driverless vehicles have been involved in minor accidents on California roads over the past six years during testing, Google said Monday, stressing that none of its cars were at fault in any of the incidents. 
 
 The company made the admission after a reported from the Associated Press said two Google driverless cars, while controlled by computers, were involved in accidents since last fall when the state gave the company official permission to start testing the technology on public roads. Nobody was hurt in any of the crashes, Google said. 
 
 But in the wake of the accidents, the police reports were not made public in accordance with California law. Google did not release the reports either — a practice could hurt the very future of driverless cars that several technology companies are trying to build. 
 
 Proponents of self-driving cars argue that computer-driven vehicles can help improve automotive safety by reacting more quickly to oncoming dangers and keeping a better eye on the environment, reducing the risk of driver error. But the public lacks objective data about whether that’s true in practice or even potentially true. 
 
 Earning drivers’ trust is going to be one of the biggest challenges for driverless car manufacturers. Giving up the steering wheel to a computer just won’t come naturally to many people. Nor will the prospect of having to share the road with machines that can make their own decisions. 
 
 ”Safety is our highest priority,” said Google in a statement. “Since the start of our program six years ago, we’ve driven nearly a million miles autonomously, on both freeways and city streets, and the self-driving car hasn’t caused a single accident.” 
 
 Add it all up and the message seems pretty clear: The autopilot was not the problem. 
 
 But what would really bolster people’s confidence is if the companies could prove that the autopilot performed well at preventing or avoiding a crash — not merely that it wasn’t the cause of a crash. 
 
 In two of the crashes, according to the AP, the driverless car features were engaged and no human was behind the wheel. Understanding exactly how the self-driving cars behaved under these conditions — and in similar situations to come — will be the key to showing whether driverless cars really are better or safer than humans behind the wheel. 
 
 Imagine a world in which driverless cars are the only types of car on the road. In this hypothetical universe, driverless cars are completely safe. Each vehicle behaves predictably according to its programming, so the interactions between those cars become predictable events as well. In this universe, the inattentiveness, speeding, road rage and the half-dozen other reasons accidents happen today would have been eradicated. 
 
 The world we inhabit today is far messier. For the foreseeable future, self-driving cars will have to respond to all the crazy things human drivers do, such as cutting other people off, texting behind the wheel, or driving drunk. 
 
 If the police reports show there was nothing the autopilot could have done to prevent a crash, that’s a clear point in favor of driverless car manufacturers — especially if the reports also suggest that a human driver would have fared no better. 
 
 But suppose the crashes involved a head-on collision with an 18-wheeler whose lights were flashing and horn was blasting, and the driverless car missed all the signs. That would be a big problem. 
 
 The fact that we don’t really know, and that the state of California won’t release the reports, could become a setback for the adoption of driverless cars. We are left with voluntary disclosures by individual manufacturers to fill the gap. On Monday, Google published a post explaining that its cars have been in 11 “minor” accidents, 7 of which occurred when another driver rear-ended them. The blog post also highlights cases where the autopilot successfully avoided crash risks even as other drivers were behaving dangerously in the situation. But the full police reports were not released. 
 
 This type of crash and near-crash information, particularly on a large scale, could help consumers make informed decisions about whether to get a self-driving car if and when they finally make it to market. ||||| Internet search company Google Inc's self-driving cars have been involved in 11 accidents, but have not been the cause of any, over the last six years since the project began, the program's director said on Monday. 
 
 A team of drivers that is testing the fleet of more than 20 vehicles have driven 1.7 million miles so far. 
 
 "...Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident," Chris Urmson said in a post on technology news website Backchannel's blog Medium. (bit.ly/1GZciuW) No one was injured in the accidents, Urmson added. 
 
 "If you spend enough time on the road, accidents will happen whether you're in a car or a self-driving car." 
 
 The cars had been hit from behind seven times, mainly at traffic lights, with a majority of the accidents being on city streets rather than on freeways. 
 
 "We'll continue to drive thousands of miles so we can all better understand the all-too common incidents that cause many of us to dislike day-to-day driving - and we'll continue to work hard on developing a self-driving car that can shoulder this burden for us," Urmson said. 
 
 (Reporting by Kanika Sikka in Bengaluru; Editing by Ken Wills) ||||| LOS ANGELES (AP) — The self-driving cars that Google Inc. has been testing on California's roads and highways were involved in 11 minor accidents over the past six years, according to the tech giant. 
 
 FILE - This May 13, 2014 file photo shows a row of Google self-driving Lexus cars at a Google event outside the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Of the nearly 50 self-driving cars rolling... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - This May 13, 2014 file photo shows a row of Google self-driving Lexus cars at a Google event outside the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Of the nearly 50 self-driving cars rolling... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - This May 13, 2014 file photo shows a Google self-driving Lexus at a Google event outside the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Of the nearly 50 self-driving cars rolling around California... (Associated Press) 
 
 The company released the number Monday after The Associated Press reported that Google had notified California of three collisions involving its self-driving cars since September, when reporting all accidents became a legal requirement as part of the permits for the tests on public roads. 
 
 The director of Google's self-driving car project wrote in a web post that all 11 accidents were minor — "light damage, no injuries" — and happened over 1.7 million miles of testing, including nearly 1 million miles in self-driving mode. 
 
 "Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident," wrote Google's Chris Urmson. 
 
 It was not possible to independently verify Google's assertions about the fault and nature of the collisions. The company would not release accident documentation, and the California Department of Motor Vehicles said it could not discuss details, citing confidentiality. The agency has licensed just 48 of these test cars. 
 
 An accident caused by a self-driving car is a fear of the people developing them, whether at Google or one of the traditional automakers. That's not just because if the accident is particularly horrific, public and political acceptance of the technology would suffer badly. It's also because the reaction to the first car-caused accident will set a precedent in terms of financial liability. 
 
 "Assuming that you are not dead, you are in a much better positon than if you had been hit by an ordinary, human-driven vehicle," said Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who has studied issues about the cars. 
 
 That's because the company behind the car will have deep pockets. California law makes it hard for any but major companies or very wealthy individual to test the cars. Each one requires $5 million worth of insurance. 
 
 Given the potential for bad publicity, the company will have strong incentive to settle any lawsuit quickly and generously, Smith said. 
 
 Three other states have passed laws welcoming tests of self-driving cars onto their roads. Regulators in Nevada, Michigan and Florida told The Associated Press that they weren't aware of any accidents. 
 
 If a car in self-driving mode hits a pedestrian, the case becomes a matter of product liability. 
 
 California law has a definition of a design defect that would favor a person who is hit, said Robert W. Peterson, insurance law expert and law professor at Santa Clara University. 
 
 If the car "fails to behave in a way which a reasonable consumer would expect it to behave, that is a defect," Peterson said. The cars have a clear picture of their surroundings more than a football field away. If a person reasonably expects that one of the cars would stop rather than strike, that could create liability. 
 
 Because the cars are required to record and store the last 30 seconds of a data before any accident, reconstructing what happened should be easier, at least. 
 
 Google has modified 23 Lexus SUVs registered with DMV. 
 
 The parts supplier Delphi Automotive had one accident, which an accident report the company provided the AP showed was not its fault. Delphi said at the time the car was being driven by the person the DMV requires behind the wheel during testing. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Contact Justin Pritchard at http://twitter.com/lalanewsman. ||||| Google said Monday that its self-driving cars had been involved in 11 “minor” accidents in the past six years, a disclosure the company hopes will assuage concern about the safety of the technology, but may have the opposite effect. 
 
 Chris Urmson, head of Google’s self-driving car program, said in a blog post that the accidents caused no injuries and only “light damage.” Google’s cars were not the cause of any of the incidents, he added. He said Google’s cars had driven 1.7 million miles over the period.
– Google's fleet of 23 self-driving Lexuses has been involved in 11 accidents over the past six years of testing in California—but the company says not one of those incidents was the fault of a Google car, the AP reports. Chris Urmson, director of Google's self-driving initiative, writes in a Medium blog post that its vehicles—which have logged 1.7 million miles—had accidents that involved "light damage, no injuries"; seven of the cars were rear-ended (usually at traffic lights) and most of the accidents took place on city streets, not highways, Reuters notes. Urmson also lists other reasons why cars may get into accidents other than not having a driver: tricky intersections and turns, people not paying attention (he even cites one driver spotted playing the trumpet). The accidents are being labeled as minor and somewhat typical—Urmson notes "if you spend enough time on the road, accidents will happen whether you're in a car or a self-driving car"— and advocates for driverless cars say they actually improve safety because the cars are constantly scanning the environment for accident-causing factors and may react more quickly, the Washington Post notes. A nonprofit watchdog is trying to get both Google and the California DMV to release full reports for these accidents and any future incidents, but that doesn't seem to be happening: The DMV is citing confidentiality laws and won't give access, while Google (for now) is declining comment, per the Wall Street Journal. (A Google Street View car that got into an accident had a human driver.)