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Why Researchers Are Making Self-Driving Cars Run Over Elephants

It turns out self-driving cars look better in predictable evaluations than they do when faced with the strange chaos of real roads.

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According to a preprint study led by researchers at the University of Tübingen’s Autonomous Vision Group, today’s self-driving cars may be passing tests with flying colors, but those tests are way too predictable. This leads to those cars failing real-world tests because they were entirely unprepared for the unexpected.

The good news? There’s a new test that is trying to solve this problem.

The Fail2Drive project puts driverless cars in weird, sometimes absurd situations to test how they would react. One of those tests involved how it would react to an elephant crossing the street. Another tested how a driverless car would react to a playground slide suddenly blocking traffic. Yet another brought in some cartoon logic by presenting the car with a painted wall designed to trick it into thinking the road kept going, a test Wile E. Coyote likely........

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