Pedestrian Protection Doesn’t Come Standard in Volvo’s “City Safety” System

Warning: This video contains a disturbing moment of violence.

Via Kashmir Hill at Fusion, this video from a Dominican blog shows the scary results of a self-parking Volvo demonstration gone wrong. (No one was seriously hurt.)

The car was equipped with Volvo’s “city safety” system, which apparently lulled the crowd around it into dropping their guard. But as Hill reports, the city safety feature is designed only to prevent rear-ending other cars in slow-moving traffic. “Pedestrian detection” is an add-on that costs an additional $3,000.

“Keeping the car safe is included as a standard feature, but keeping pedestrians safe isn’t,” writes Hill.

Even if the car came with pedestrian detection, Volvo told Hill, a driver who hits the accelerator would deactivate it. The utopia of driverless cars that can avoid all crashes is still a long way off.