Google’s self-driving car is the victim in a serious crash

Google’s self-driving cars don’t have a flawless safety record, but it’s clearer than ever that careless human drivers remain the greater threat. A commercial van running a red light struck one of Google’s autonomous Lexus SUVs as it crossed a Mountain View intersection, seriously damaging the side of the vehicle. Neither the Google observers nor the van driver were hurt, thankfully. However, this is likely the worst incident to date for Google’s driverless cars — previous crashes have typically involved humans rear-ending the robotic cars at low speed.

Google will likely shed full detail on the collision in its self-driving car report due at the end of the month. It makes no bones about what happened in a statement, though (see below). The Lexus didn’t enter the intersection until “at least” 6 seconds after its traffic light turned green. There was no question that the van driver was at fault, in other words. Google also stressed that red light violations are the “leading cause” of car crashes in US cities, and that 94 percent of those are due to human mistakes.

Although the outcome could have been much worse, the crash underscores a key problem with moving to autonomous cars: that piloted and robotic vehicles will likely have to share the roads for a long while. Google, Uber and others can design driverless systems that follow the law to a tee and adapt swiftly to unexpected road hazards, but it might be near-impossible to protect against human drivers who throw caution to the wind. Crashes like these likely won’t disappear unless self-driving tech becomes the rule.

“A Google vehicle was traveling northbound on Phyllis Ave. in Mountain View when a car heading westbound on El Camino Real ran a red light and collided with the right side of our vehicle. Our light was green for at least six seconds before our car entered the intersection. Thousands of crashes happen everyday on U.S. roads, and red-light running is the leading cause of urban crashes in the U.S. Human error plays a role in 94% of these crashes, which is why we’re developing fully self-driving technology to make our roads safer.”

Via: 9to5Google, TechCrunch

Source: KRON, CBS

Google might introduce another WiFi router on October 4th

We’re less than two weeks away from Google’s big fall event in San Francisco, and we already have a good idea of what to expect — Pixel-branded smartphones, maybe Google Home, maybe a 4K-capable Chromecast. Android Police is offering up a new potential bit of hardware we haven’t heard about yet: a new router called Google WiFi.

If you’re keeping track at home, yes, Google already does have its own line of branded routers. The OnHub line launched late last summer as a router that’s simple to control with your smartphone and good looks that’ll make you want to place it prominently in your home. However, both of the two OnHub-branded routers were built by third party manufacturers (TP-Link and Asus).

This new Google WiFi router would be presumably built in-house, like the rest of the hardware that Google is set to introduced in October. Additionally, Android Police says that buying multiple routers (they are rumored to cost $129 a pop) would link together to create a mesh network, a nice feature for larger dwelling that are hard to blanket with WiFi signals.

It sounds like this router would be relatively small and unobtrusive as well, comparable in stature to Amazon’s Echo Dot. That means it would likely omit features like multiple Ethernet ports. The router is also rumored to have “smart” features, similar to what we see in the OnHub series. What those features will be remains to be seen, but the OnHub series works with Philips Hue lighting and IFTTT — not to mention its own excellent iOS and Android app for managing various settings.

This still seems like a strange pursuit with Google having launched OnHub last year, but on the other hand the company seems more and more keen these days to offer its own first-party hardware as much as it can. We’ll know if Google WiFi is for real in less than two weeks.

Source: Android Police

YouTube Heroes will help keep the website’s comments clean

If you’ve ever ventured into YouTube’s comments, you know how nasty things can get. To help it purge all the bad juju the section brings, the video-sharing website is enlisting the help of volunteers called “Heroes.” It’s an expanded version of the Trusted Flaggers Program and gives users who want to help out not just the power to flag inappropriate comments and videos, but also to add captions and subtitles. Members also get a separate dashboard where they can track their contributions, see if the captions they submitted had been approved and if the content they flagged had been removed.

While YouTube will still get the last say on what to remove from the website — again, Heroes can only flag and report them — a lot of people still aren’t happy that the Google-owned entity is putting unpaid volunteers in charge. Regardless of what users think, the Heroes program is happening, and it’s now open to people from around the globe who have a history of contributing to the community.

You can apply right here if you spend a lot of time on YouTube anyway. Just take note that the program has a gamification aspect: the more you contribute, the more features you unlock. You might have to start at the very bottom and work your way up to get access to training materials and to gain the ability to flag multiple videos at the same time.

Via: CNET

Source: YouTube