“Mistakes in negotiating who yields to who are very unlikely to involve injury, as long as you don’t involve things smaller than cars (such as pedestrians.) Robocars will need to not always yield in a game of chicken or they can’t survive on the roads.
“In this case, Google says it learned that big vehicles are much less likely to yield. In addition, it sounds like the vehicle’s confusion over the sandbags probably made the bus driver decide the vehicle was stuck. It’s still unclear to me why the car wasn’t able to abort its merge when it saw the bus was not going to yield, since the description has the car sideswiping the bus, not the other way around.
“Nobody wants accidents – and some will play this accident as more than it is – but neither do we want so much caution that we never learn these lessons.
“It’s also a good reminder that even Google, though it is the clear leader in the space, still has lots of work to do. A lot of people I talk to imagine that the tech problems have all been solved and all that’s left is getting legal and public acceptance.
“There is great progress being made, but nobody should expect these cars to be perfect today. That’s why they run with safety drivers, and did even before the law demanded it. This time the safety driver also decided the bus would yield and so let the car try its merge. But expect more of this as time goes forward.”
