Sooner or later it had to happen: it occurred in Florida, on May 7th, the first fatal traffic accident of a self-driving car in the United States. The victim was the driver of a Tesla S, which had engaged the automatic driving system on a highway near Williston.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Tesla crashed into an oncoming truck. Blame? The sky too bright.
Tesla explained on its website that neither the driver nor the autonomous driving system saw the white side of the truck, due to the day too bright: the system would have confused the side of the white truck with the clear sky. But this "mistake" that cost one person his life is not the only problem with self-driving cars.
According to Science magazine and a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the majority of those interviewed would never purchase a self-driving car, because self-driving cars could endanger the lives of "driver-passenger” in case the vehicle is faced with a group of pedestrians who suddenly appear.
That is, self-driving cars would prefer to save the lives of pedestrians at the expense of that of the passenger. How many people would buy a self-driving car knowing that they could die if a group of pedestrians suddenly cross the road?
