Page 23 - atoday

TECHNOLOGY A23
Tuesday 1 March 2016

Google self-driving car strikes public bus in California

BY JUSTIN PRITCHARD In this May 13, 2015, file photo, Google’s self-driving Lexus car drives along street during a demonstration at Google campus in
ASSOCIATED PRESS Mountain View, Calif.
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A self-
driving car being tested Associated Press
by Google struck a pub-
lic bus on a Silicon Valley damage. ity, especially if damage ing to test on city streets in about what went wrong.
street, a fender-bender “An internal VTA investiga- was negligible and neither the spring of 2015. In most Under state law, Google
that appears to be the first tion is still going on, there Google nor the transit au- cases, Google’s cars were must retain data from the
time one of the tech com- are several pieces of in- thority pushes its side. Still, rear-ended. No one has moments before any ac-
pany’s vehicles caused an formation that need to be the Feb. 14 collision could been seriously injured. cident.
accident during testing on examined, so no determi- be the first time a Google A spokeswoman for Cali- “As far as he-said she said
city roads. nation of liability has been car in autonomous mode fornia’s DMV, which regu- there shouldn’t be any of
Google accepted some made,” spokeswoman Sta- caused an accident. lates Google’s testing of that. It’s all there,” said
responsibility for the colli- cey Hendler Ross said in a Google cars have been about two dozen Lexus Robert W. Peterson, an in-
sion, which occurred on written statement. involved in nearly a doz- SUVs in the state, said the surance law expert at San-
Valentine’s Day when one There may never be a for- en collisions in or around agency hoped to speak ta Clara University who has
of the Lexus SUVs it has mal determination of liabil- Mountain View since start- with Google on Monday studied self-driving cars.q
outfitted with sensors and
cameras hit the side of the Microsoft to ship developer
bus. No one was injured, HoloLens for $3,000 in March
according to an accident
report Google wrote and In this April 29, 2015, file photo, a woman wearing a HoloLens The Associated Press blocking out the real and
submitted to California’s demonstrates how the technology can be used to test and de- Microsoft says it will start replacing it with a 360-de-
Department of Motor Ve- velop robotics at the Microsoft Build conference in San Fran- shipping a developer ver- gree fictional universe.
hicles. cisco. sion of its augmented re- The HoloLens operates on
The agency posted the ality device, HoloLens, for Windows 10 and unlike the
report Monday on its web- Associated Press $3,000 on March 30. Rift, requires no tethering to
site. In the accident report, That’s around the same a separate computer.
Google wrote that its car time Facebook’s Oculus It’ll use a custom-built chip
was trying to get around will begin shipping the con- designed on an Intel plat-
some sandbags near the sumer version of its Rift virtu- form. It’ll let users record
curb at an intersection near al-reality headset for $600. high-definition video that
its headquarters in Moun- HoloLens differs from the recreates a mix of holo-
tain View, California, when Oculus Rift in that it makes graphs overlaid on the real
its left front struck the right the viewer see three-di- world that can be shared
side of the bus. Google’s mensional objects in the with people without the
car was sliding to the left real world, rather than device.q
to pass the sandbags and
make a right turn.
As the Lexus nudged out at
2 mph it collided with the
bus, which was traveling
at 15 mph, Google wrote.
The car’s test driver - who
under state law must be
in the front seat to grab
the wheel when needed
- thought the bus would
yield and did not have
control when the collision
happened, according to
Google.
While the report does not
address fault, in a written
statement Google said,
“We clearly bear some re-
sponsibility, because if our
car hadn’t moved there
wouldn’t have been a col-
lision.”
The statement called the
incident “a classic ex-
ample of the negotiation
that’s a normal part of driv-
ing - we’re all trying to pre-
dict each other’s move-
ments.”
The Santa Clara Valley
Transportation Authority
said none of the 15 passen-
gers or driver on its bus was
injured. The bus had minor