Update on autonomous driving: crashing into fences is an issue

Someday we’ll get there in our self driving cars. But that day is not tomorrow, that’s for sure.

Waymo, the world’s leading company when it comes to self driving cars, had a bit of a struggle with their cars driving into fences. You’d think these static objects would be picked up by the sensors all over the car, but you’d be wrong. Waymo’s kept crashing into chains, gates and other roadway barriers, mostly at low speeds. A fact that makes this occurrence even more strange.

Over 1.200 of the self driving taxi’s in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin where called back to receive a software update which would’ve fixed the issue, which occurred late last year as a result of an investigation into the crashes by the NHTSA.

The crashes show that even after almost a decade of having self driving taxi’s on the road, they still do weird, unpredictable shit.

And it’s not like this is a thing that just happens every once in a while. Waymo recalls hundreds of vehicles every year for updates because they unexpectedly crash into poles or don’t know how to handle road situations.

It means perfection is certainly not attainable, but it also means that there are a lot of hurdles to be taken in the near future.

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Just take a look at where Waymo is testing their taxi’s. And where Tesla is hoping to start testing their cars. All in sunny, mostly dry climates. No rain, no ice, no random acts of nature that a self driving car doesn’t know how to handle. Drop a Waymo in an area like New York and there will be a completely new learning curve to be tackled, even aside from the climate.

But let’s stay positive here: at least we’ve moved from deadly crashes with pedestrians crossing the road to a bit of paint damage on a fence.

Unless you take a look at China. Things are not going as well as hoped there either. A Xiaomi SU7 which was driving itself, crashed into a barrier killing three people inside. The car saw the object and had started to brake, but it wasn’t enough.

It was an event which led the Chinese government to step in and take a closer look at the development and testing of autonomous driving cars and putting some stricter rules into place. So the next time you hear a self driving fanboy claim “they are doing it in China”, you can reply with: “What? Killing people?”.

There are so many things that happen in daily traffic all over the world that self driving cars don’t know about. Either the data for it hasn’t been collected, or there is so little of it that it's hard to learn cars what to do with it. Stuff like fences, chains and other things on roads that drivers just instinctively know how to deal with.

If you take all these things and the data needed for it into account, you know progress will be made at painfully slow pace.

Looks like you’ll be stuck in traffic for the next couple of years, maybe decades…

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