Self-driving cars can be tricked into seeing red traffic lights as green

Aiming lasers at the cameras used in driverless cars caused them to incorrectly interpret red traffic lights as green 30 per cent of the time

By Matthew Sparkes

Driverless cars could be tricked into interpreting a red traffic light as green, leaving them vulnerable to attacker-instigated crashes.

The legislation around autonomous vehicles varies worldwide. Although fully driverless cars aren’t yet on the roads, with such vehicles in development, concerns have been raised that they may be more vulnerable to vandalism and hence robust regulation is needed to protect against this.

To learn more, Chen Yan at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and his colleagues tested whether the cameras of different …