THE first person has been killed by their driverless car. Super bad news. Not just for the family but for the cause of driverless cars in general.
An American man was using the Tesla Autopilot feature on a highway in Florida when his car failed to see a white truck crossing the highway against a sky described as “brightly lit”. The car did not react and ploughed under the truck, tearing the roof of the car. The car spun across the road and the man — Joshua Brown, 40 — died at the scene.
What have we learned from this? Two things.
First: driverless cars will crash. That was obvious — there is no computer system that doesn’t fail and no car that doesn’t crash. Anyone clinging to the idea of a computer controlled car that never crashes was trapped in a fantasy. But now we have the actual horror of a crash to deal with.
Second: when a Tesla on autopilot crashes, the story whips across the internet like a blaze through dry grass.
This is not good news for people who want driverless cars to succeed. And that should probably be all of us — they are likely to be much safer on average, and could save a lot of time, reduce traffic, etc.
Just a few more high profile crashes could mean driverless vehicles are stopped in their tracks.
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