Autonomous driving continues to advance and while it does so, it continues to put on the table situations in which it must improve. That is what has happened with Amazon's autonomous car, Zoox, which has recently been involved in two accidents with motorcycles. This is the reason why an investigation file has been opened against the company in the United States.
And that is where, due to legislation, autonomous driving is evolving much more. In fact, there are autonomous cars circulating in different parts of the country and even performing taxi duties. All of them are in the experimental phase and that is why it is common for there to be some unforeseen situations.
Just as it went viral a few months ago how several autonomous taxis in Los Angeles caused a traffic jam by not knowing how to coordinate among themselves, now it is the news about the accidents they have had as opposed to motorcycles.
It must be remembered that one of the great challenges that autonomous driving faces is being able to correctly detect and interpret motorcycles. It is something that has been worked on for a long time, but it is not proving to be so easy to solve, and it shows that the task of driving is much more complex than it might seem at first glance.
The self-driving car didn't prevent the accident, would a human driver have?
In any case, the positive thing is that neither of the two accidents recorded had serious consequences for the motorcyclists, and ended with little more than an anecdote. For now, in Europe autonomous driving is not approved and that is why we are not having relative news like what happens in the North American country.
Still, these two accidents may sound very scandalous, but would they have been avoided if a human was driving? Perhaps that is the most important question, because in Spanish cities we are used to seeing accidents every day and, as we said, there is not a single autonomous car on the road.
