The GPS Made Me Do It

Here we go again, the GPS made me do it. It was 2AM or thereabouts on a Wednesday morning in Henrico County  when a driver apparently followed the instructions on his GPS and turned onto the railway track according to the story on CBS6.

He escaped the car before the train hit and was not injured.

Here’s the thing as I have said many times. You can’t blame the GPS. The driver has to use the navigation device as a guide and should be alert enough when driving a motor vehicle to see through the windscreen of his car that he was not in fact turning onto a road, but onto a train track. This is the train track concerned from Google Streetview. Looks like a rail crossing to me, it has lights and barriers. It has rails.

So what would an autonomous car do? Would an autonomous vehicle do the same thing with a data error late at night when visibility may not be great. If it followed the instructions and the driver was resting or asleep, trusting in technology, how might this story have played out?