People do some truly crazy stuff when they encounter Google's driverless cars
When people see Google's driverless cars, things get weird.
Each month, Google releases a monthly report detailing its autonomous cars progress. In a recent report, the company detailed how many truly strange scenarios self-driving cars face everyday. Like, preparing for a massive group of leap froggers:
"We can try to come up with lots of wacky situations for our cars to handle, but the real world can defy even our wildest imaginations," Google wrote in the report.
The scenarios highlight how the robot cars must be smart enough to handle situations that are so weird programmers wouldn't think to address them in a hypothetical sense in advance.
Chris Urmson, who was director of Google's self-driving car project at the time of the report, put into perspective just how crazy things can get at the "South by Southwest" music festival in Austin, Texas. Here are some examples: