Apple’s Self Driving Car was Rear Ended by a Human Driver in its first Crash ever

Hello everybody, This is Tanweer. Today I have interesting Auto Tech News related to the Apple self-driving car which was rear-ended while merging onto an expressway near the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters. Apple records first-ever accident in self-driving car programme.

The Apple modified Lexus RX450h car carrying special equipment and sensors which was going at 1 mph was hit by a Nissan car from behind at 15 mph but neither car’s passengers received any injuries. According to a report filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, it was the first time an Apple self-driving car was involved in an accident, but like most autonomous car crashes, it wasn’t the software’s fault.

As Apple never talks about its autonomous vehicle programme, the accident came to light only after a report by the California Department of Motor Vehicles was filed about this incident. The safety of self-driving cars has become a source of concern for US transportation regulators this year after one of Uber Technologies Inc’s vehicles struck and killed a woman in March in Arizona, prompting the company to shut down its testing efforts for a while.

This does not really much about Apple’s progress in making autonomous cars, as the accident was most likely resulted out of human error, it is interesting to note that most such accidents involving self-driving cars have been rear-enders. Per a report by Consumer Affairs last year, most self-driving car crashes involved a human-driven car ramming into the back of either a stationary or slow-moving self-driving car.

Autonomous software makers need to take this into account. Autonomous cars don’t drive the same way as people do which is kind of the whole point of having an autonomous car in the first place. However, if they don’t drive the way humans do, they are likely to get into conflict with human drivers on road. That indicates that while Apple, Google, and other self-driving car makers can make software capable enough to drive safely, the same cannot be said about humans.

Apple expanded its fleet to 27 cars in January and then again by 18 more cars in March. Apple has also partnered with Volkswagen to have a fleet of such cars in its Cupertino campus.

CONCLUSION: For Apple, the crash is an inevitable, yet small bump in the road to get autonomous cars on the roads. It’s not a measure of Apple’s self-driving system in any way, instead, it seems the fault lies with the human driver of the Nissan. It is possible that, despite all the attempts to make autonomous vehicles drive as safely as possible, we’ve overlooked how to make them drive like humans. To do that, developers have to take into account how people behave on roads and put some of that into self-driving cars. Obviously not the road rage bits though.