From your own link:
"Google and Delphi said their cars were not at fault in any accidents, which the companies said were minor."
"Google and Delphi said their cars were not at fault in any accidents, which the companies said were minor."
> If you spend enough time on the road, accidents will happen whether you’re in a car or a self-driving car. Over the 6 years since we started the project, we’ve been involved in 11 minor accidents (light damage, no injuries) during those 1.7 million miles of autonomous and manual driving with our safety drivers behind the wheel, and not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.
I genuinely look forward to future stats that will tell us self-driven cars have a much lower likelihood of even being involved in accidents, independent of fault. To me, that level of defensiveness and net safety is also a measure of progress.
As an example: Let's say a particular self-driven car has a low threshold to "stomp on the brakes, hard" at the slightest sign of danger. Will this keep it from accumulating "at fault" accidents? Probably. But can that behaviour effectively contribute to causing accidents that it's not "at fault" for (being rear-ended)? Probably. Safer roads? Difficult to say.
"we’ve been hit from behind seven times, mainly at traffic lights but also on the freeway"
If you are stopped at a red light with a car in front of you, sitting there and taking a collision from behind can be the best course of action, depending on the trailing car's speed.