You’ve probably heard the news: An autonomous Google-Lexus brushed a city bus at about 2 miles-per-hour. There’s been plenty of discussion on the incident, some of it oddly hysterical, but most of it has centered on the idea of the future capabilities of autonomous traffic to operate in traffic as it exists today. In other words, from everything I’ve read, the Google automotive team, and everybody else working on the autonomous-car problem, assumes that their cars will have to deal with the same conditions that you and I might face if we were behind the wheel of that automobile.

If that is truly the case, then autonomous vehicles are in for a rougher ride than anybody yet suspects, because they won’t have to deal with the same conditions that human drivers do. Their reality will be much, much worse.

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