What’s the point of the driverless car?

A first last week: a Google driverless car in autonomous mode was partly at fault in a collision, interestingly one involving a bus. The car was merging into a lane of faster-moving traffic to dodge a pile of sandbags in a collapsed drain and nudged in ahead of the bus on the assumption that its driver would give way. He didn’t.

I suspect this may be a failure of social intelligence. Human drivers, for all their faults, can intuitively read the behaviour of other road users very well. We instinctively know that bus drivers are less likely to give way than car drivers. Understanding humans is always going to be easier when you know what it’s like to be one: in reading human emotions, even the best technology still lags far behind the typical domestic dog.

Most popular

Ross Clark

Labour is out of its depth with electric cars

Google is currently testing its cars in California, where there are few pedestrians.