Are Californians Really Physically Attacking Autonomous Cars?

According to our friends at 'The Guardian', people in California are hitting back at their new robot neighbors – truly – as reports detail attacks on autonomous cars. The biggest guarantee of self-driving autos is that they will spare many lives by expelling the most error prone and eccentric component from vehicle movement: the human. Yet, in San Francisco, there is actual rage against the machine.

Two of the six collisions involving autonomous cars in California so far this year involved humans colliding their cars into self-driving cars, obviously intentionally, as indicated by incident reports collected by the California department of motor vehicles.

On January 10^th, a person in the San Francisco’s Mission District attacked a GM Cruise autonomous vehicle that was at a standstill waiting for people to cross the street, according to an incident report filed by the car company. The person was “shouting”, the report states, and “struck the left side of the Cruise AV’s rear bumper and hatch with his entire body”. There were no injuries but the car’s left tail light was damaged.

There was another similar incident just a few blocks away on January 28^th when a taxi driver in San Francisco got out of his taxi, approached a GM Cruise autonomous vehicle and “slapped the front passenger window, causing a scratch”. 

These are just a few instances where humans fought against this new technology and it’s probably just the beginning of the outward "rage against the machine" because there are many new automated vehicles and robots coming to the public behind these so either we must adjust to the inevitable or keep up these ridiculous small attacks against innovation. We can learn to work with such technology to improve our lives and not be threatened by it and people could definitely find a better way to protest these frustrations in our society. 

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