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Las Vegas Launches Self-Driving Shuttle, Which Experiences Accident in First Hour of Service
Maybe is because it's unfortunate acronym ARMA which means "weapon" in most Latin languages. This coincidence could be an ironic reminder of how the technology can become a weapon if badly used or if is immature.
The design flaw here is not really the autonomous vehicle, is it? It really did *avoid* the accident. We now have 2 buckets: vehicles that operate near-flawlessly an stop to avoid collisions, and vehicles operated by humans. We are, statistically, TERRIBLE at driving. It's early, there isnt much detail, but I dont think the robot car is really the problem here
I have to admit,"taking an evasive action" to avoid the very simple fender bender could have caused something much worse. It could have sideswiped a car in the next lane if it was two lanes going the same direction. It could have hit an oncoming car head-on. Either one of those could have lead to an even bigger accident. It also could have hit a pedestrian or a cyclist. A human might not have been able to assess all that information in a second to make a proper decision to avoid the larger catastrophes but instead take the fender bender.
Let's assume that its programming wouldnt have driven it into another vehicle, bike, person...etc. How about just slowly backing up to use whatever space was available? Perhaps any car present behind it would have seen the situation and backed up also to provide more room. What if all of the cars behind it had the same programming and backed up in series? The real solution to the problem is vehicle to vehicle communication, to bad that seems to be a ways off now.
Yes if all vehicles spoke to each other and they all could back up in unison, that would solve this problem. But at that point, they would also speak to the truck which backed up into this bus, eliminating that issue from happening as well.