One of Google’s driverless cars has been involved in an accident for the first time in a situation where human drivers rely on the normal social etiquette of the road to avoid scrapes, according to an accident report filed in California.
The incident highlights the challenges of programming machines to deal with the sort of social situations that humans encounter every day on the roads, but which are beyond robots to resolve, experts said.
It also threatens to cast an unflattering light on the technology at a time when Google is fighting a proposed California rule requiring autonomous vehicles to have human drivers on hand to override their controls in emergencies.