Self-driving cars are oftentimes victims in hit-and-run incidents

David Paul Morris

SAN FRANCISCO — Around 1 a.m. on March 6, a driverless car from the tech startup Cruise was trying to make a left turn when it encountered something its algorithms probably couldn’t predict: An Infiniti Q50 performing “donuts,” a popular and unlawful pastime for some of the city’s night owls, in the middle of the intersection.

The two vehicles collided head-on, according to a report that the company later sent to state authorities. Cruise said its vehicle suffered moderate damage, but that no one was injured. The experimental car had no driver at the time — an increasingly common sight in San Francisco — as part of an ongoing test of late-night robotaxis.

Whether the Infiniti driver suffered any damage or injuries isn’t clear. They didn’t stick around.

It was the latest example of a pattern bedeviling tech companies that are trying to make driverless cars a reality: hit-and-run crashes seemingly caused by human drivers, according to a review by NBC News of collision reports filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

The reports, which were written by employees of the tech companies, describe 36 instances in 2022 in which a person driving a car or truck left the scene of a crash involving their vehicle and an autonomous vehicle. The problem has continued at a similar pace this year, with seven examples as of early March.

Driverless cars operate in only a handful of fair-weather cities. Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, operates a nightly driverless taxi service in San Francisco, and Waymo, which shares a parent company with Google, has a similar service in Phoenix. Other companies including Apple, Mercedes-Benz and Amazon subsidiary Zoox are running tests in places such as California, Florida and Texas.

The hit-and-runs pose a problem for driverless technology and its future: Even when self-driving cars are programmed to do everything right, it can be hard to avoid the mistakes of human drivers.

“This is popping up more and more in San Francisco,” said Anderson Franco, a personal injury attorney in the city.

At least three hit-and-run incidents involving self-driving cars in San Francisco resulted in injuries, according to the collision reports. In one last May, two Cruise workers reported back injuries after a BMW rear-ended their vehicle, which was in autonomous mode and stopped at a red light. In all three cases, the drivers of the other cars left the scene without exchanging information, the reports say.

In another case, a Cruise vehicle in autonomous mode with two company workers inside was rear-ended twice by a Honda driver in Golden Gate Park, according to a collision . The Cruise car was stopped at a red light at around 3:53 a.m. on a Tuesday in August when the Honda driver bumped it from behind; then, the report continues, the Honda driver reversed backward several feet, stopped and drove forward again, making contact with the Cruise vehicle a second time. The two collisions damaged the back of the Cruise vehicle and injured the two Cruise workers inside, the report says.

“Anyone involved in a collision with an autonomous vehicle should call 911 and remain on scene,” he added. The SFPD has its own for how law enforcement should deal with a driverless vehicle.

In California, leaving the scene of a collision where there was damage can be prosecuted as a — or, if someone was injured, prosecuted as a felony by up to five years in prison.

Roger McCarthy, an engineering consultant in Palo Alto, California who has the collision reports of autonomous vehicles, said that human drivers are “overwhelmingly at fault” when there’s a collision between them and a driverless car such as a Cruise or Waymo. Many of the collisions are rear-end crashes, where the human driver misjudged whether the autonomous vehicle would proceed, he said.

But McCarthy said he’s sympathetic to the human drivers who are part of a real-world experiment — one that state regulators OK’d, but that drivers didn’t consent to. Last year, the San Francisco Examiner on what to do if you get in a collision with a driverless car, but the hit -and-run incidents have gone on.

Source: news.yahoo.com