After fatality, autonomous car development may speed up

The successes are real. In 2004, not a single

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vehicle completed even 10 miles of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge for autonomous navigation across 150 miles of the Mojave Desert. Nineteen months later five vehicles were up to the task. In 2007, six teams completed the far more difficult DARPA Urban Challenge, which involved navigating through a city-type environment with other autonomous and human-driven vehicles obeying California driving laws.

Subsequently, Google recruited several of the technical leads from the Grand Challenge teams to develop autonomous cars. All the major car manufacturers in the United States, Europe and Japan now have serious efforts to develop autonomous passenger vehicles. Most notably, upstart Tesla boldly sells vehicles equipped with sensors and software that allow operators to run the cars in autonomous mode in various situations including highway driving. Cars operating autonomously already have logged millions of miles on U.S. roads.

However, the recent fatal crash of a Tesla Model S operating in "autopilot" mode suggests that some people may be too confident in this new technology in its current state. As we have seen with other innovations, sometimes a user's death causes development to slow down – but other times, progress speeds up to address the newly uncovered problems.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2016-08-fatality-autonomous-car.html#jCp