Self-driving Chevy Bolt bumps motorcycle in minor collision

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https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/self ... collision/

December 20, 2017

Autonomous-vehicle tech is still very new, and thus, extra scrutiny is given to any collision involving one. Well, there's a new crash in town, but it's not the robot's fault.

Tucked away on the California Department of Motor Vehicles' website is a collision report from Dec. 7, involving Cruise Automation's autonomous Chevrolet Bolt EV and a human on a motorcycle—a 1996 Honda S90, if you're into that sort of thing. It happened at the corner of Oak St. and Fillmore St. in San Francisco.

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According to the report, the self-driving Bolt was operating in autonomous mode when it went to change lanes, from the center of a three lanes to the left. Its gap had begun to shrink, so it made its way back to its original lane. At that same time, a motorcycle was lane splitting between the left and center lanes, and the bike bumped the Bolt, wobbled and went down.

The Bolt EV was traveling approximately 12 mph when the collision occurred, and Honda S90 was moving at about 17. The biker got up, walked his bike to the curb and the two parties exchanged numbers. Per Cruise policy, they called 911. The biker was eventually taken away to receive care for an alleged shoulder pain. The self-driving Bolt suffered a "long scuff" on its passenger side.

Even though lane splitting is legal in California, the police determined that the biker was at fault "for attempting to overtake and pass another vehicle on the right under conditions that did not permit that movement in safety."

"At Cruise, we test our self-driving cars in challenging and unpredictable environments precisely because by doing so we will get better, safer AV technology on the roads sooner," said a spokesperson for General Motors, which acquired Cruise in 2016, in an emailed statement. "In this case, the motorcyclist merged into our lane before it was safe to do so."

One of the primary concerns in early self-driving cars is safety. There's almost always, if not always a human behind the wheel, ready to take over in case the car's computers get flummoxed. Waymo has seen its fair share of scraps, an overwhelming majority of which were due to impatient or otherwise negligent humans in other cars. The first time Waymo was ruled at fault in an accident was early 2016, back when it was just another division of Google.

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https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/12/dr ... francisco/

12/20/2017

Cruise said the motorcyclist, who walked away from the collision, was at fault.

An autonomous vehicle owned by Cruise, the autonomous car startup that was acquired by GM last year, struck a motorcyclist on San Francisco streets earlier this year. According to a filing with the California DMV, the motorcyclist was able to walk away from the crash but reported shoulder pain and was taken to the hospital to receive medical care. Cruise says that police at the scene determined the motorcyclist was at fault for the collision.

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The Cruise vehicle was traveling in the middle lane of a three-lane, one-way street in San Francisco's Lower Haight neighborhood. It spotted a gap in traffic in the left lane and began changing lanes—but then the gap started to close as the vehicle ahead slowed down. So the Cruise car shifted back into the center lane.

Normally, that would be an unremarkable chain of events on San Francisco's busy streets. Unfortunately, Cruise says, "a motorcycle that had just lane-split between two vehicles in the center and right lanes moved into the center lane." The motorcycle "glanced the side of the Cruise AV, wobbled, and fell over."

Cruise says its car was traveling at 12 miles per hour, while the motorcycle was going 17 miles per hour.

"We test our self-driving cars in challenging and unpredictable environments precisely because, by doing so, we will get better, safer AV technology on the roads sooner," Cruise said in an email statement. "In this case, the motorcyclist merged into our lane before it was safe to do so."

This is far from the first collision involving a Cruise vehicle on San Francisco streets. The company reported 14 collisions to California authorities between September and November of this year—a reflection of the company's active testing on San Francisco streets. Many of these involved another car rear-ending the Cruise vehicle.

Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt has touted Cruise's decision to test on San Francisco streets, arguing that the company's software will learn the fastest if it's operating in challenging urban driving environments.

"Our vehicles encounter challenging (and often absurd) situations up to 46 times more often than other places self-driving cars are tested," Vogt wrote.

He provided statistics in October showing that San Francisco vehicles encounter tricky situations like "pass using opposing lane" and "construction navigation" 20 to 40 times more often in San Francisco than in the Phoenix suburbs where Waymo and Uber are doing a lot of their testing.

Unfortunately, while California collects statistics on every autonomous vehicle accident and posts the details to its website, we don't have comparable information from the extensive testing that is happening in Arizona.

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http://www.motorcycle.com/features/feat ... -html.html

December 21, 2017

General Motors acquired Cruise, an autonomous car start-up, last year, and has been testing its cars ever since in San Francisco and other places. Why not? “Our vehicles encounter challenging (and often absurd) situations up to 46 times more often than other places self-driving cars are tested,” according to Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt in this article at arstechnica.com.

In this “test” involving a little inner-city lane sharing on a three-lane one-way street, the car glanced off the side of the bike (or did the motorcycle graze the car?), causing the bike to wobble and fall over from a speed of 17 mph; the car reportedly was travelling 12 mph. The rider walked away with a sore shoulder and the blame for the accident, according to the SFPD.

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Here’s the accident report:


That’s not even close to being the first autonomous collision in SF, but it might be the first involving a motorcycle. The arstechnica reporter included this handy link to the Department of Motor Vehicles list of accidents involving autonomous vehicles. I read all 27 of the 2017 entries, and in none of them was the autonomous vehicle at fault. Every one I read involves the autonomous vehicle getting rear-ended, sideswiped or clipped by a non-autonomous vehicle, often driven by a person described as “distracted.” In two reports, the driverless car was hit after it slowed or stopped for a scooter in one case, and a pedestrian in the other. In none of the reports did the autonomous vehicle turn left in front of, or pull out in front of an oncoming vehicle – our main cause of concern as motorcyclists.

Meanwhile in my neck of SoCal, the Orange County Register reports on yet another fatal motorcycle collision yesterday morning, which judging from this photo, looks like a clear example of a car turning left in front of an oncoming motorcycle.


MO’s deepest and sincere condolences to the family of the unnamed 68-year old Harley rider the 24-year-old driver of this car killed. Maybe autonomous vehicles will be better for us than we realize, and the sooner the better?

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https://www.siliconvalley.com/2018/01/2 ... al-motors/

January 23, 2018

General Motors is in a race to be the first company to mass produce self-driving cars—and may actually be at the forefront—but a crash with a motorcyclist in San Francisco has led to questions about the technology, and a lawsuit.

San Francisco commercial photographer Oscar Nilsson sued GM on Monday, after a Dec. 7 collision with a Chevrolet Bolt vehicle that had aborted a lane change while driving autonomously in San Francisco.

GM’s subsidiary Cruise has since August been conducting a testing program for self-driving cars in San Francisco. Under state law, the vehicles must have a human backup driver behind the wheel.

Nilsson claims in the suit that he was riding behind one of GM’s autonomous Bolts on Dec. 7 on Oak Street, when the car, with backup driver, changed lanes to the left. When he rode forward, the Bolt suddenly veered back into his lane and knocked him to the ground, according to the lawsuit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

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The San Francisco Police Department’s report on the incident assigned blame to Nilsson for passing a vehicle on the right when it wasn’t safe. Nilsson’s lawyer Sergei Lemberg disputed that finding.

“I don’t know what a police officer can tell, after the fact,” Lemberg said Tuesday. “I don’t know that it’s fair to blame this act on the completely innocent person who’s just driving down the road and gets hit.”

The police report, said Lemberg, actually supported blaming GM. It noted that after the Bolt determined it couldn’t make the lane change, and began to return to the right lane while Nilsson was passing on the right, the Bolt’s backup driver tried to grab the wheel and steer away, but the collision occurred simultaneously.

“Why don’t these folks just take some responsibility?” Lemberg said.

A crash report filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles by GM provided a much different view of the accident. The company acknowledged that the car, in autonomous-driving mode in heavy traffic, had aborted a lane change. But GM said that as its car was “re-centering itself” in the lane, Nilsson, who had been riding between two lanes in a legal-in-California practice known as lane-splitting, “moved into the center lane, glanced the side of the Cruise…wobbled, and fell over.”

General Motors declined to comment on the lawsuit. It has been running a “Cruise Anywhere” program since August for employees, which allows them to hail automated Cruise vehicles and be driven anywhere in San Francisco. It was unclear whether the vehicle involved in the accident was part of this program.

It was also unclear if the Bolt in question was one of the “third-generation” automated vehicles described in September by Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt as “the world’s first mass-producible car designed to operate without a driver.” Those vehicles were intended to be used in the “Cruise Anywhere” program, Vogt wrote in a Medium post.

As self-driving cars take to the roads in increasing numbers, collisions with standard vehicles are inevitable, as are lawsuits. The companies operating the vehicles are likely to settle quickly in cases where the technology appears to be at fault, and fight mightily when they believe the driver of the ordinary vehicle to be responsible, said Stanford researcher and University of South Carolina School of Law professor Bryant Walker Smith.

“There might be data that might tend to show fault or no fault,” Smith said.

That information—potentially including video and other driving data from the autonomous vehicle—should be publicly disclosed whenever a self-driving car crashes, said John Simpson, spokesman for non-profit Consumer Watchdog, a frequent critic of speedy deployment of autonomous vehicles.

The crash highlights an important concern: Self-driving vehicles may not behave like those driven by humans, leading to accidents, Simpson said.

“That’s going to continue to be a huge area where we’re going to have problems,” Simpson said.

While Google took an early lead in autonomous driving with a program now spun off into its own company, called Waymo, GM’s manufacturing capabilities and other advantages have allowed it to catch up, according to a report by market-research firm Navigant Research in January.

Nilsson claimed in his lawsuit that he suffered neck and shoulder injuries from the crash, which will require “lengthy treatment,” and that he has had to go on disability leave from work. He’s seeking unspecified damages.

According to GM’s crash report, the Bolt was traveling at 12 miles per hour, while Nilsson had been driving at 17 miles per hour. After the collision, Nilsson “got up and walked his vehicle to the side of the road” and “reported shoulder pain and was taken to receive medical care.”

In California, autonomous vehicle test drivers must have good driving records and successfully complete a test-driver training program administered by the car maker, DMV spokeswoman Jessica Gonzalez said.

“Companies with permits are allowed to test on any California public roadway—they don’t tell us which ones they are testing on,” Gonzalez said.

General Motors and its Cruise subsidiary have had a permit to test autonomous vehicles on California roads since June 2015, and have 110 vehicles and 300 test drivers approved for testing, according to the DMV.

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https://www.motorcyclenews.com/news/201 ... r-lawsuit/

January 31st, 2018

Is this the shape of things to come?

An American motorcyclist is suing General Motors after a collision with a driverless car which was being tested in California.

The accident happened while the Chevrolet Bolt was being tested in San Francisco on December 7, 2017. Oscar Nilsson was riding his motorcycle in traffic when the vehicle allegedly veered into his path, knocking him from his bike.

The Bolt was reportedly travelling at 12mph and had a back-up driver behind the wheel. Nilsson was travelling at 17mph. San Francisco police deemed Nilsson wholly at fault for the accident because he was breaking local laws by filtering—or lane splitting as it is known in the States.

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The Chevrolet went to move into the right-hand lane before aborting the manoeuvre, the back-up driver also attempted to steer the vehicle away from Nilsson but it was too late to avoid the collision.

Nilsson was able to pick up the bike and walk it to the side of the road at the time of the incident, but has been reported to have suffered neck and shoulder injuries following the collision.

General Motors have been testing autonomous vehicles in California, developing self-driving technology. The testing is done with a back-up driver who is able to override the controls.

Other self-driven incidents
Reuters report that there were six incidents involving self-driven vehicles last September. However, none of the autonomous vehicles, or their back-up drivers were found to be at fault, with human error of the other parties being hailed as the cause in each of the cases.

Most of the claims involved drivers of other vehicles hitting the self-driving vehicles while they were slowing for obstacles or stop signs. One of the incidents involved a driver who was distracted by his mobile and rear-ended the autonomous vehicle, which was stationary at a red light. In another case, a drunk cyclist travelling in the wrong direction crashed into a Chevrolet Bolt that had been stopped by the back-up driver and was not moving when the cyclist hit the bumper and fell over.