Volvo's Response To Self-Parking Accident Video

Trending News: Volvo's Response To Disturbing Self-Parking Accident Video Equally Disturbing

Why Is This Important?

Long Story Short

Long Story

Because it's incidents like this that are going to keep people hesitant from buying driverless cars.Last week, a video was posted to YouTube showing a Volvo XC60 car accelerate forward into a crowd during a "self-parking" demonstration. Volvo has responded to concerns saying that the car in question was likely not equipped with "pedestrian detection," which costs an extra $3000 to install.Last week, a Dominican Republic blog called Remolacha published a post featuring a YouTube video of a Volvo XC60 self-parking demonstration gone horribly wrong.

In the video, the car backs up, pauses, and then quickly accelerates into the crowd of people in front of it, violently knocking one man's legs out from under him, throwing him up onto the hood of the car.

The two men hit were reportedly "bruised, but are OK" according to Remolacha's description under the video.



Fusion News reached out to Volvo for some insight on what went wrong here, and their answers were, unfortunately, not very reassuring.

Johan Larsson, a spokesperson for Volvo told Fusion that it appears that the owner of the car was not trying to demonstrate self-parking, but rather "pedestrian detection and auto-braking."

“Unfortunately, there were some issues in the way the test was conducted," said Larsson.

According to him, the owner of this Volvo did not pay for the "Pedestrian detection functionality," a feature that costs an extra $3000 to install.

Larsson explained to Fusion that all Volvo XC60s come equipped with the "City Safety" feature, which prevents the car from rear-ending another while driving slowly, but Pedestrian Detection is a separate package.

What?

Should it even be possible to buy a self-parking car that doesn't come with Pedestrian Detection? That almost seems on par with selling someone a regular car, but telling them airbags cost extra.

Eerily, the crowd of people standing in front of the car remain motionless, hands-in-pockets as the car accelerates towards them, suggesting that their faith in its artificial intelligence has totally overrided their survival instincts.

The takeaway here is that Volvo needs to better educate consumers about which safety features come with the car and which are extra. And consumers need to recognize that, AI or not, a car is still a dangerous piece of machinery that shouldn't be treated like a toy.



Own The Conversation

: Will Volvo add Pedestrian Detection as a base feature after this incident?: Driverless cars and cars with self-parking features should be equipped with Pedestrian Detection when you buy them.: As of May 2015, Google driverless cars have been involved in 11 accidents in the six years that they've been on the road. Although, Google maintains these were all cause by manual errors.