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Comment by jdscriven | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the vast majority of collisions with google's AVs are rear-end collisions at intersections. I'm surprised that they haven't put any technology in place to attempt to avoid, or at least reduce the impact of these collisions. Clearly, predicting the trajectory of other vehicles should be second nature for the AVs.

In the video, there appears to be a shoulder with plenty of escape room.

Is there any attempt made to un-distract the driver? Flashing brake lights? Horn?

The June report from Google (http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/) contains some interesting language:

"The Google AV had been stopped for about 11 seconds at the time of the impact"

The cynic in me thinks they are intentionally avoiding technology to address these types of accidents so that they can unequivocally prove the the AV had no fault (i.e., had been stopped for x seconds).

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Is there any attempt made to un-distract the driver? Flashing brake lights? Horn?

This sounds too similar to victim blaming. In my opinion any action taken by someone who is about to be hit from behind in a low speed crash is likely to make the problem worse. I don't think that is the time to have a quick jerky motion into the shoulder of the road. Even honking the horn could distract or panic another driver that then causes a crash.

To me the solution is to eliminate distracted driving.

There's a middle ground here where the car sees it's about to be rear-ended and softens the hold on the brakes just enough to convert some of the impact energy to forward motion.

It knows the distance to the car in front and has a good idea of the rear car's speed. The only real variable is the weight of the approaching car but a pessimistic estimate could leave more margin to avoid touching the car in front.

That's the total opposite of what the car should do if it knows it's going to be rear ended. It should lock the brakes and tension the seat belts.

It depends on how fast the incoming car is travelling. If you are about to be rear ended by someone traveling 60 miles an hour (happens sometimes in rural areas where people don't pay attention and are traveling highway speeds on narrow two lane roads), then it would actually be safer to accelerate the car to 30mph and crash into the person in front of you so that it is a 30mph impact to front and 30mph impact to rear rather than a massive 60mph impact to the rear of the car.

You're demonstrating perfectly the urgent need for self-driving cars.

If this is happening at intersections, releasing the brakes would potentially push your car into oncoming traffic and add a t-bone collision that would not have happened otherwise.

You're being way too dismissive here.

When stopped in a place other drivers might not expect, just flashing the brake lights does wonders. Probably because human eyes and brains notice change much more readily than a solid light.

> stopped in a place other drivers might not expect

You should expect drivers to stop at intersections. You should normally leave enough space between you and the car in front to avoid rear-end collision, even if that car stops suddenly. And there's already a signal the car in front has slowed - their brake lights come on. (Maybe that's not a US thing though?)

Well, for one people do not expect drivers to stop at a green light, like was the case here. You might wish everybody was well aware of their environment, but the fact is, a green light is a strong signal that makes people assume the other drivers are moving or are going to.

The second point is completely off-topic, as the car in question had plenty of space between them and the Google car's rear-end. It just failed to notice it was not moving.

The last point is already addressed in my previous comment: a solid brake light is much less noticeable than a brake light coming on. In some countries in Europe it's relatively common to have blinking brake lights, but I don't think that's the case in the US.

These points are just basic human behaviour, and they aren't going away, no matter how contemptuous you are and how much you look down on other people.

>Well, for one people do not expect drivers to stop at a green light, like was the case here. You might wish everybody was well aware of their environment, but the fact is, a green light is a strong signal that makes people assume the other drivers are moving or are going to.

Watch the video. The self-driving car braked because the two cars in front of it did.

Hmm... of course it did. It's not a human. The green light vs. stopped traffic can't mislead it the same way a human can be misled through inattention.

The car behind the self-driving car didn't stop though, which lead to the incident. Presumably because it didn't pay attention to the fact that the cars in front were not moving despite the green light.

I'm not sure I understand where this thread is leading.

Perhaps this is a cultural thing? Over here green means proceed with caution.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

> GREEN means you may go on if the way is clear. Take special care if you intend to turn left or right and give way to pedestrians who are crossing"

You seem to be saying that people are shitty drivers and that we need to either just put up with it, or fit our cars to stop some careless inattentive idiot from driving into us.

Fuck that.

Bad drivers should learn to drive.

There's two things, bad people and bad drivers. Schools can only teach proper driving, not proper behavior. And schools are doing a sub-par job IMO. There are so many things you are not taught there or are in a hand-wavy fashion.

And you should always drive at the speed limit and come to a complete stop at stop signs. And yellow does not mean accelerate.

Lots of non-shitty drivers do not follow every road rule to the letter under every circumstance and, indeed, it's not always possible to especially without pissing off everyone around you.

I actually agree with the basic point that it's the following driver who has 99% of the responsibility not to run into the car ahead. That said, there are plenty of behaviors like coming to unnecessarily abrupt stops in unexpected places (which I'm not saying is the case here) that will absolutely lead to people running into you.

Your argument is essentially against all forms of safety equipment that protect against being rear-ended, and can be used without substantial modification to argue against safety equipment of all kinds: why bother with crumple zones when I could just insist everyone else on the road were better? The reality is that I am in the car being hit, there is little to nothing I can do to make people not hit me at some point in my life (and to this date, I have been in a car rear-ended twice; in both situations the person behind us was 100% at fault under essentially any useful definition of "at fault"), and so I have a budget I am willing to spend on random safety equipment to make me less likely to be injured when this happens. I already am spending a lot of money on safety features for my car: at least these ones sound cheap to add.

Green light are dubious, you don't know how long until they shift, and thus you 'really should' decelerate a bit (driving school talk). With clearer signs, you could at least not fear having to stop in emergency. But even then, that won't stop someone to cross his red light ...

Roads signs are like compiler warnings, it's all cute and nice, but it's just characters on the screen anyone can physically ignore. Let's have roads with nasty speed bumps before all intersections, which are all annoying, impossible to cross fast, roundabouts. #haskell

>Well, for one people do not expect drivers to stop at a green light, like was the case here.

This is bad driving. You use the brake lights (and if you haven't seen the break lights working, you use the visual speed til you confirm the break lights are working) to determine of a car is going to stop. You should never put yourself in a position where any other factors are involved in if the car in front of you will stop or not.

> a green light is a strong signal that makes people assume the other drivers are moving or are going to.

And such drivers are to be held responsible for crashes and should be educated when found. Those who do not change should lose the privilege of driving.

> Well, for one people do not expect drivers to stop at a green light, like was the case here.

er:

> The lane to the left of the Google AV was a left-turn-only lane. The vehicle waiting immediately behind the Google AV in the straight-only lane began to move forward when the green arrow left turn signal appeared (despite the signal for the straight-only lane remaining red) and collided with the rear bumper of the Google AV.

Are you talking about a different incident?

Sure, hitting someone stopped is almost always the legal fault of the person rear-ending.

But that doesn't mean that Google is somehow off the hook. Google could invent a car that never causes crashes, but yet is still more dangerous than a human driver based on the inability to avoid crashes that humans easily avoid.

And, really it isn't hard to envision such a car being built. If it randomly hits the breaks to avoid phantom sensor readings, then the cars might be stopping in unexpected places an order of magnitude worse than a normal driver.

I'm sure driverless cars will eventually be safer than human, but I'm not convinced they will be.

When I went to driving school they tought us to leave quite some room in fornt of us when stopiing at lights etc. Then when the other car stops behind you you close the gap (or if the car behind you is going to rear end you you have some escape room, ie. always also check for space to get out of the line.) The point being was that also check for trafic behind you when stopping.

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