Google self-driving slip ups: Human intervention needed. Trend’s good.

Technological breakthroughs never come easy, and having just finished Ashlee Vance’s book on Elon Musk, this is even more apparent. The SpaceX and Tesla founder is a close pal of Google’s Larry Page, Page saying he’s ended up on Musk’s house-surfing schedule. The two along with Google co-founder Sergey Brin also have these meetings in a secret apartment in Palo Alto, California, where chats tend towards the absurd and fantastic. And while Musk’s focus is electric cars and space, one of Google’s projects is self-driving cars. The company released a report on a 14 month-long test and while the trend looks good, only 272 times the driver had to take the wheel, there are still limitations: “The most common cause for intervention occurred when technology did not properly sense a real-world situation.” One can only imagine what would happen on South Africa roads. But given the track record of Google, driverless cars should be on American roads at least, in the near future. – Stuart Lowman

by Glenn Chapman, AFP

Google on Tuesday said that while its self-driving cars have safely driven more than a million miles, there have been times when humans have had to take over to avoid crashing.

System “anomalies” caused drivers to take the wheel 272 times in California test cars in the 14 months leading up to December, Google said in a report to the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

The test period saw cars travel more than 420,000 miles (676,000 kilometers) across the state.

There were an additional 69 occasions when drivers seized control from automated systems based on their own judgment calls, according to the report.

The most common cause for intervention occurred when technology did not properly sense a real-world situation, the report indicated.

Read also: Bloomberg View: Who’ll win Driverless Cars race – Tesla, Google, Apple?

‘Trend looks good’

Google then plays out these situations on a simulator to reveal whether the vehicle would have hit something had the human not taken control, according to Chris Urmson, head of the Internet giant’s self-driving car team.

Simulations determined that 13 of the 69 “driver-initiated disengagements” would have resulted in crashes if the car had been steering, the report indicated.

Two of the incidents involved traffic cones and three were blamed on reckless driving by someone in another vehicle.

Eight of the near-misses took place over the 53,000 miles traveled in California in 2014, while only five happened as the cars logged a hefty 370,000 miles during the 2015 part of the trial, according to Urmson.