Google's driverless cars scare pedestrians in Texas

 By the looks of things, Google's self-driving
cars have been learning a lot in Austin, Texas.
In its first report since it began testing
autonomous vehicles in the city, the company
details the challenges its cars have had to face
while driving on its roads. For instance, they've
been spotting and avoiding a lot of deer, some
of which might have ended up as road kill if
they happened to come across ordinary
vehicles instead. The system also had to learn
to identify new infrastructure, such as
horizontal traffic signals. Google has learned,
however, that one of the major problems it
has to tackle is pedestrians stepping off the
curb onto the road while hidden by other
vehicles.
On August 20th, a Lexus unit was rear ended
after spotting a person starting to cross the
road. See, its human driver took over to make
sure he doesn't end up harming anyone, but it
turns out -- based on the footage of the
incident -- that the accident wouldn't have
happened if he just allowed the car to brake on
its own. Clearly, Google's doing what it can to
achieve its original goal of developing
autonomous vehicles that can drive better than
humans. In addition to discussing what it has
learned in Austin, Mountain View has also
revealed through the report that it's deploying
more of its egg-like prototype models in the
city this September.Google