Self-driving cars are always pegged as the safer option to human-driven cars. They’re faster to react, more aware of their surroundings, and able to make quick, calculated decisions in an accident to keep the occupants safe. But what happens when the other participant in a crash isn’t another car but a person?
A hypothetical question often asked is what would an automated vehicle do when a child (for example) darts into traffic? Would it swerve to protect the child, thereby putting the occupants in danger if it flips or crashes, or would it relentlessly bear down on the poor kid by choosing the guaranteed outcome of the riders’ safety?
That’s why Google-spinoff Waymo is working on new car designs to make these situations a lot safer for everyone involved. The company recently patented a design where the vehicle is held together by internal “tension members”. The idea is that these cables or springs would be able to tighten or slacken in the event of a crash. If the car’s sensors detect you’re about to hit another car, these would tighten at the location of predicted impact, hardening the exterior. If, instead, it’s a pedestrian, they would loosen up to try and minimize the damage to them.
Of course, there are no true designs just yet, it’s mostly just theories and sketches at this point. We’re not even sure it would work well enough in a real-world situation to warrant building something like this. However, it’s probably slightly better than an earlier idea from Google, which involved coating the car’s exterior with adhesive so a pedestrian hit would instead stick to the car like a fly, instead of being thrown.
Not how we pictured climbing walls like Spiderman.