April 7, 2016 Page 3 Rec Park and The Plunge Easter Egg Hunts Photos by Marcy Dugan, marcyduganphoto.com Donovan Finney checking out his catch. Ava DeJesus loving the Easter Bunny. Lucia Ramos taking her time picking up the eggs. Jaden Provisor making an underwater snag. They’re off and running to find that golden egg. Sanjan Solomon with his prize basket for finding a golden egg. Google’s Test Car Makes a Rookie Mistake By Rob McCarthy California’s self-driving car project went six years and nearly 1.5 million miles without causing a crash until last month when a Google test car sideswiped a Bay area bus. The Google engineers took responsibility for the low-speed impact, and claimed the software-controlled car made a rookie mistake. It assumed the bus driver would wait. The Google car and the city bus were sharing a generously wide lane when the software-controlled vehicle encountered “a tricky set of circumstances on El Camino,” according the Google team report. El Camino Real is a three-lane boulevard, much like Sepulveda Boulevard, with right-hand lanes wide enough for two drivers. The Google team decided to teach its self-driving car how this is done. “We began giving the self-driving car the capabilities it needs to do what human drivers do: hug the rightmost side of the lane,” engineers said in their report of the Valentine’s Day crash. “It’s vital for us to develop advanced skills that respect not just the letter of the traffic code but the spirit of the road.” A Google engineer was in the car at the time, however, the software was doing the driving. The vehicle pulled toward the right-hand curb to prepare for a right turn when it detected sandbags near a storm drain blocking its path. The Google car stopped, allowed some other drivers to pass, then angled back toward the center of the wide right lane at 2 mph when it sideswiped the city bus going 15 mph, the report describes. None of the bus passengers was injured, and a videotape released last week by the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Agency backs up Google’s claim it was a minor incident. Passengers appear surprised when the driver asks them to step off the bus right after the incident. The Google engineer in the car at the time A self-driving SUV with a Google employee aboard collided with a metro bus in Mountain View last month. Credit: Google Self-Driving Car Project. said that he also expected the bus driver to slow down and let the Google car back to the center of the lane. The videotape showed extensive damage done to the driver’s side of the autonomous vehicle, a Lexus sport utility vehicle. Google has 14 of the self-driving Lexus SUVs in Mountain View. Eight are in Austin, Texas, and one car is testing in Kirkland, Wash. “Our car had detected the approaching bus, but predicted that it would yield to us because we were ahead of it,” according to the February Google Self-Driving Car Project report. The engineers called it an everyday type of misunderstanding between human drivers. “This is a classic example of the negotiation that’s a normal part of driving -- we’re all trying to predict each other’s movements. In this case, we clearly bear some responsibility, because if our car hadn’t moved there wouldn’t have been a collision. That said, our test driver believed the bus was going to slow or stop to allow us to merge into the traffic, and that there would be sufficient space to do that.” So far, the self-driving car project is a Northern California experiment. Critics of the self-driving car project think the state government and Bay area police should investigate each crash rather than take Google’s explanation at face value. Google says its cars have been hit nearly a dozen times since street testing began up north almost two years ago, and that other drivers were at fault each time. The February bus incident is the first time that Google took responsibility for the traffic collision. The federal Highway Traffic Safety Administration told the Herald that the need to track collisions isn’t necessary because of the limited testing of robot-controlled cars. Spokesperson Derrell Lyles told the Herald the NHTSA is taking a watch-andsee approach to regulating Google’s project in the early phase. “They are not being driven by the general public. NHTSA remains in close communication with the leading developers of self-driving vehicles regarding the testing of these vehicles. Given this very limited exposure and the controlled nature of the testing, there is no need for a formal system for tracking crashes involving self-driving vehicles at this time,” Lyles wrote in an email. Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog isn’t so trusting of Mountain View-based Google, which is best known for its web search engine and online tools for analyzing web traffic. The group issued a demand on March 9 that Google release its videotape of its robotic car crashing into the transit bus, now that the bus authority released its video of the incident. “Google undoubtedly has its own — and probably better — video showing how its self-driving robot car crashed into a bus,” said Director John M. Simpson with Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project Director. “Google needs to come clean and release their video, as well as all recorded technical details related to the crash.” The transit company’s video can be viewed at http://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/ nation/2016/03/09/81526496/ Consumer Watchdog also renewed its call to the California DMV to amend its regulations and require that police investigate all self-driving robot car crashes and that See Google Car, page 5
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