Google patents pedestrian (and cyclist?) protecting sticky bonnet for self driving cars

Google’s latest patent is a sort of human flypaper which would grip and hold pedestrians, and perhaps cyclists, in the event they were hit by one of the firm’s driverless cars. The idea is to keep the person hit from bouncing off the bonnet, meaning “both the vehicle and pedestrian may come to a more gradual stop than if the pedestrian bounces off the vehicle.”

The patent points out that many crash injuries are not cause by the initial collision, but from when the pedestrian is thrown from the car onto the ground.

Google’s idea is for "an adhesive layer positioned on the front end of the vehicle." This would bond the person to the front of the car so that they remained with it until it stopped.

A car with a sticky bonnet would of course raise more mundane problems relating to vehicle cleanliness, which is why Google envisages an eggshell-like layer covering the adhesive. That layer would shatter in the event of a collision.

Stanford School of Law professor and autonomous car expert Bryant Walker Smith told The Mercury News that even if the idea was somewhat bizarre, Google were to be applauded for at least considering the safety of people outside the vehicle.

"The idea that cars should be safe for people other than the ones in them is the next generation of automotive safety. 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."

Walker Smith did however point out that such an idea could bring problems of its own.

"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. 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."

A Google spokeswoman said the existence of a patent doesn't necessarily mean a new product is on the way. "We hold patents on a variety of ideas. Some of those ideas later mature into real products and services, some don't."

Other recent Google patents relating to driverless technology have included a way for its vehicles to recognise cyclists' hand signals and technology that would see vehicles logging the location of major flaws in the road surface before uploading that information to the cloud to form a giant, constantly-updated, pothole database.