Collision with bus when making turn at intersection

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Reference no: EM132219027

Google, Tesla, and other companies (including Apple, according to some rumors) are working on technology that would allow for fully autonomous or self-driving cars. Recently one of Google’s test vehicles had a collision with a bus when making a turn at an intersection. This event demonstrated the potential dangers of driverless cars and highlighted the fact that safety concerns will still be a problem even if computers are in charge of our cars.

Imagine that you are on the design team for the software that will be installed in a self-driving car manufactured by Company X. The question that is currently facing your team is what to do in a situation when a pedestrian steps into a crosswalk directly into the path of the self-driving car. The particular situation involves a narrow road with only one lane of traffic in each direction and traffic is heavy but moving at about 50 miles per hour in both directions. There is also a sidewalk on both sides of the road that is filled with pedestrians. There is a row of large telephone poles between the car traffic and the pedestrians on the sidewalk. In this scenario the driverless vehicle is expected to have time to slow down to only about 45 miles per hour at impact with the pedestrian. There would also be time to swerve into a telephone pole. It is expected that each of these scenarios would result in at least one fatality as can be seen from the table below:

Course of Action: Potential Fatalities

Apply brake and strike the pedestrian 1 pedestrian

Apply brake and swerve into telephone pole Occupant of the self-driving vehicle

Use the Revised 8-Step Model to describe your decision making process as it relates to the scenario above. Then, based on your analysis, indicate which course of action the software should be programmed to take.

Finally, would your recommendation change if you knew that you were going to be the occupant of the self-driving vehicle? Why or why not?

Reference no: EM132219027

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