Oops. Maybe those self-driving cars aren’t as safe as we think.
Reuters reports that two self-driving cars — one Google’s, the other Delphi Automotive’s — nearly collided on a Palo Alto street this week, according to a Delphi executive. It’s the first such incident that has been reported between two self-driving prototypes.
Delphi’s John Absmeier, director of the company’s Silicon Valley lab and global business director for the company’s automated driving program, was a passenger in one of the cars. He told Reuters that the Audi Q5 he was in (“equipped with lasers, radar, cameras and special computer software”) was about to change lanes when the Google self-driving car, a Lexus RX400h, cut the Audi off.
No word on whether either vehicle is equipped with a middle finger.
Absmeier told Reuters that Delphi’s Audi averted the accident. No official word from Google yet, but the company just reported on its safety in May, stating that its self-driving cars “have been involved in 11 total accidents over 1.7 million test miles. None significant. Or caused by the Google cars.”
Google declined to comment to Reuters about the incident.
Update: An article in the LA Times has both Google and Delphi denying the aforementioned run-in happened as Reuters described. “It was not a close call,” Delphi spokeswoman Kristen Kinley said in an email to the LA Times. “The vehicles did not come within a lane width of each other.”
Kinley told the Times that it was an interaction “we encounter all the time in real-world driving situations,” i.e. a typical lane change.
Google also issued a statement that told the LA Times: “The headline here is that two self-driving cars did what they were supposed to do in an ordinary everyday driving scenario.”
Delphi actually just completed a cross-country drive with its self-driving prototype called the Roadrunner. Watch their YouTube video documenting the journey here:
