"Stanford School of Law professor and autonomous car expert Bryant Walker Smith praised Google -- once he stopped laughing about the patent.
"The idea that cars should be safe for people other than the ones in them is the next generation of automotive safety," Smith said. "Manufacturers have gotten remarkably good at protecting the occupants of the vehicle, but there's been much less attention to protecting the people outside. I applaud anybody for thinking, as they should, about people outside of the vehicle."
But, Smith said, Google's patent highlights a problem central to safety engineering: solutions create their own concerns. Air bags save lives but can cause injury or death, for example, and seat belts sometimes keep people restrained when they'd be better off ejected, he said.
"If you had a pedestrian stuck on a car that then crashed into something else, that could be worse than if the pedestrian was thrown to the side or thrown over the car. It could also be better. It's very dependent on the chaos of the situation," Smith said. "The history of progress is replacing one set of problems with another set of problems and just really hoping that your new set of problems in aggregate is less than your original problem.""
- Date Published:05/19/2016
- Original Publication:The Mercury News