Source: Hemera Technologies / Getty
This Wednesday, a self-driving shuttle bus was being tested for the first time in Las Vegas. It spent only a few hours on the street before a delivery truck backed into it.
According to New York Daily News, the bus did everything it was supposed to do — its sensors noticed the truck backing up and the bus stopped. The driver however, apparently didn’t see the bus and they made impact.
There were a few passengers on the bus and luckily no one got injured. However, this whole situation taught us four things. Swipe through to read our thoughts.
Humans can’t drive.
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Sure the bus was relatively small compared to a massive vehicle, but come on, why didn’t the truck driver see the bus in the first place? Imagine if it was a car, a dog — a human! Either the driver needs to get their mirrors checked or living organisms should stay off the road.
The self driving bus has some kinks to work out.
According to one passenger, the self-driving bus doesn’t have the ability to back up and that’s why it stopped when it sensed the truck coming. Now you’d think the bus would have a sensor in the back to let it know if it’s safe to back up…say to avoid a huge truck coming from the side. Is that too much to ask? Maurice Bell, an executive at Keolis Transit America (which helps operate the smart bus), said they now have more data to improve what went wrong with the bus. So, let’s hope they get it right next time.
At the end of the day, people don’t want to do a lot of work when it comes to traveling.
Even after the accident, the city of Las Vegas said they’ll still operate the smart bus over the next year. By the sound of this, it seems like a few accidents aren’t going to prevent progress for self-driving vehicles. How else are we going to update our Twitter account and drive at the same time?
Bus drivers might want to start learning a new skill.
The sad part about technological progress is usually people’s skills become less and less relevant. Surely some bus services will want to keep the human-to-human interaction, but others might take the smart bus route and label humans useless. We’ll find out where these new test drives go, as the future continues to wait for no one.
