Thursday, November 9, 2017

Oops: AAA's Self Driving, Las Vegas Shuttle Gets In Fender Bender On Day One

The first-ever, fully self-driving shuttle bus in the nation--sponsored by AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah--had an inauspicious first day on the job on Wednesday, quickly getting in a fender bender with a semi. According to local media reports, the self-driving shuttle collided with a semi pulling out of an alley, within hours of its launch. The self-driving NAVYA Arma shuttle is being operated by French company Keolis. The AAA had said, before the launch, that the self-driving pilot project would be used to "study consumer responses to advance technology" which says could dramatically reduce traffic fatalities. In this case, the accident was blamed on the (human) driver of the semi, however, it appears that the AAA's experiment may have had an unintended impact upon one of the goals of the project: to understand why a large percentage of consumers remain wary of driverless technology.