Self-Driving Cars Get Confused Around Animal Drawn Vehicles

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

[Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/]

If you’ve ever been to New York City (NYC), you’ve likely seen the horse drawn carriages near Central Park.

Tourists delight in going for a ride in the carriages and having a romantic trip.

There is an ongoing controversy about the horse drawn carriages and there are some that believe it is inhumane or improper to have the horses do this task, especially in the NYC environment.

According to published reports and a catalog of incidents kept by PETA, earlier this year there was a case of a horse and carriage that took off into the streets of NYC without the carriage driver, and the horse ran into two parked cars, injuring the horse and the cars.

Even worse was an incident in which a horse was being raced to the front of the hack line by a carriage driver (the hack line is where the carriages wait to find someone willing to pay for a ride, like waiting for a cab), and the entire carriage overturned and injured the horse.