Given Google’s recent confession that its self-driving cards would have been involved in 13 crashes if a human hadn’t intervened, you’d assume that having a real driver in an autonomous car could only help. Then you remember that millions of humans crash their vehicles every day, regardless of how intelligent that car is.
Mashable reports that a self-driving Nissan LEAF owned and operated by Cruise Automation — a company that sells after-market autonomous driving kits — crashed into another vehicle while rolling down the streets of San Francisco.
But unlike Google’s self-driving car that would have crashed without human intervention, it appears the Nissan vehicle crashed because of a human.
According to the accident report [PDF], the Jan. 8 incident occurred when the self-driving LEAF began deviating from course, swaying left and right within its lane. The driver then took control of the vehicle, but failed to “change the path of the vehicle and it collided with an unoccupied Toyota Prius.”
No one was hurt in the incident, and Mashable reports that both cars suffered minor damage.
Human error caused a self-driving Nissan LEAF to crash in San Francisco [Mashable]
by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist