As car accidents go, it wasn't much: Twelve minutes before noon on a cool June day, a Chevrolet Bolt was rear ended as it crawled from a stop light in downtown San Francisco. What made this fender bender noteworthy was the Bolt's driver: a computer.
In California, where companies such as Cruise Automation Inc. and Waymo are ramping up testing of self-driving cars, human drivers keep running into them in low-speed fender benders. The run-ins highlight an emerging culture clash between humans who often treat traffic laws as guidelines and autonomous cars that refuse to roll through a stop sign or exceed the speed limit. Mike Ramsey, an analyst at Gartner Inc. who specializes in advanced automotive technologies, said that they don't drive like people. They drive like robots.
Companies are now testing autonomous vehicles from Phoenix to Pittsburgh and developers are closely watching how they interact with their human-driven counterparts as they prepare for a future in which they will be sharing the road.
