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The driverless car crashed again.
This time, it was Waymo.
On Friday afternoon local time, that is, in the early morning of Beijing time, a serious traffic accident occurred in Chandler, Arizona, USA. A Honda sedan collided with a Waymo test vehicle in an autonomous driving state, and the occupants of the car were severely injured. hurt.
It was the first time Waymo had been involved in a car accident at their place this year, police said. Chandler shares the Phoenix area with Tempe, where Uber was involved in a fatal crash in March.
The local TV station ABC15 Arizona sent back some videos and pictures from the scene. The "serious" mentioned at the beginning can be seen from the images:
Judging from the photos from the scene, the accident was serious. Waymo's Pacifica test car had a sunken left door, the left front wheel had been crooked, and the surrounding body could even be seen to be shattered.
Looking at the right side, which is basically uninjured, it can be seen how serious the deformation of the left side is.
The Honda car that collided with it had already smashed into a small section, and the front passenger door was damaged and the glass shattered, but the front windshield was still alive, and the body behind it seemed to be intact.
In November, Waymo announced that it would conduct a fully driverless road test in Chandler without a driver, but the test car involved in the accident still had a safety officer. According to local police accounts, Waymo's car was in autopilot at the time of the accident, but there was someone in the driver's seat. The safety officer suffered minor injuries in the crash.
The accident happened near the intersection of Chandler Village Drive and Chandler Boulevard, roughly where the red circle is on the satellite image below:
The specific situation is as follows: A Honda car was driving east along Chandler Boulevard. To avoid a car driving north along Los Feliz Drive, it veered into the opposite lane, that is, the lane from east to west, and collided with it. Got into the Waymo test car that was heading west.
Both vehicles involved in the accident have now been taken away by tow trucks.
The Waymo test car was not exceeding the 45 mph limit at the time of the accident. Based on preliminary evidence at the scene, police say Waymo cannot be blamed for the accident. Chandler Police Department spokesman Seth Tyler said Waymo was just "in the wrong place at the wrong time" and that security officers "did nothing wrong."
Police are investigating whether Honda and the car it evaded ran a red light. Also, we don't yet know what decisions Waymo's test car made when the accident happened, and what actions it took to avoid the accident.
In order to restore the situation in more detail and determine the responsibility for the accident, we have to wait for the video of the camera on the Waymo test car to be released, as well as the accident analysis of Waymo.
While responsibility for the accident is not entirely clear, the timing of the accident was very unfavorable for Waymo. Public trust in autonomous driving has hit rock bottom after an Uber driverless car killed a pedestrian in March and a Tesla Autopilot took its owner into a barrier.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on a conference call a few days ago that the use of Tesla's Autopilot will drop whenever there is negative news. This kind of negative reports that will affect the willingness to use Autopilot, mainly of course, are car accidents.
Waymo is an independent company from Google's unmanned vehicle team. Their autonomous driving technology can be said to be the benchmark for the entire industry. If subsequent detailed investigations reveal any inappropriate response in this accident, it will undoubtedly destroy public confidence in autonomous driving even more severely.
As of the qubit press release, Waymo has not issued a statement to the media.
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