Comment by toast0
9 hours ago
That reminds me of the Feb 14, 2016 collision in Mountain View [1] (sorry for pdf, but it has the best images of articles I saw) between a Google self-driving car and a VTA articulated bus. TLDR, the software and the safety driver thought the bus would move out of the way because it was a big vehicle and a professional driver. From the report:
> Google said it has tweaked its software to "more deeply understand that buses and other large vehicles are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles."
Maybe that got lost.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2016-03-apnewsbreak-video-google-self-...
I think it made a calculation that it could do it, and did it. I think it was absolutely correct with respect to the physics and timing. What was not factored in to it was how surprising it would be to other drivers, and what would happen if a pedestrian or cyclist or some other surprise showed up, and it would just have no margin whatsoever so it would be straight to the trolley problem.