Volvo’s Self-Driving Car Drives into Pedestrians

on June 4, 2015 at 12:20 pm

We know that self driving cars are designed not to hit people or get into accidents so why did this one?

What we hear more often than not is that self-driving cars are safer, and they are aren’t they? In all recorded events there have been little to no accidents with the car at fault so why did Volvo’s self parking XC60 run into a couple of journalists during an event in the Dominican Republic?

Johan Larsson, Volvo’s spokes-person believes it may have been a neglected feature. The pedestrian detecting package– yes package– is an “add-on”.

Once again the claim is that the blame should be aimed at human error. Larsson’s comment means Volvo simply decided not to install the package and boy was it a mistake. In the thrill of Volvo’s shining new machine, these journalists got a flash of ” the rise of the machines”.

Perhaps this feature shouldn’t have beenan an “add-on” considering avoiding pedestrians for a human driver definitely isn’t a feature, but more importantly we hope Volvo has learned from this error. Selling the XC60 may prove to be more difficult now for Volvo than they would like it to be.

Source: The Independent

Author

Angel Damion Robles

Angel started writing at a young age keeping a journal since he was 12 years old. By the time he was 15 he had a binder overflowing with ideas. His senior year of high school he received a scholarship for his writing in English and an award for writing and directing a full length movie for his film club. At 19 he went to film school in LA with a focus on screenwriting where he wrote a series of shorts. He is a futurist and keeps up to date about current tech, especially automation. He is currently studying Computer Science in Berkeley and interested in writing code and working with hardware. Some interesting facts: He knows too much about Google, loves cats, and has one white cat named Nasa.