You’re looking at what’s known in the autonomous-car industry as an “edge case”—a situation where a vehicle might have behaved unpredictably because its software processed an unusual scenario differently from the way a human would. In this example, image-recognition software applied to data from a regular camera has been fooled into thinking that images of cyclists on the back of a van are genuine human cyclists.
This particular blind spot was identified by researchers at Cognata, a firm that builds software simulators—essentially, highly detailed and programmable computer games—in which automakers can test autonomous-driving algorithms. That allows them to throw these kinds of edge cases at vehicles until they can work out how to deal with them, without risking an accident.