Google self-driving cars have been involved in 14 minor accidents.
By Dileep Thekkethil
Causing major embarrassment to the X team (previously Google X) working on the ambitious self-driving car project, one of its prototypes crashed into a public bus in California last month. Fortunately, the accident did not injure the Google employee who was inside the vehicle.
This isn’t the first case of accident involving a Google self-driving vehicle none the less this is the first time that the famed self-driven car has caused one.
According to reports, an expert team is scheduled to meet the California’s Department of Motor Vehicles to understand what went wrong in the calculation of the vehicle and to determine who was exactly responsible for the accident.
According to reports, a Google driverless car traveling at 2mph crashed head on in front of a public bus which was traveling at just around 15mph.
The Google employee inside the car, who has the access to override the automated system reported that he thought the bus which was coming opposite to the vehicle would slow down for the car to pass but that didn’t happen nor did automated system in the car sense the danger and pushed the break, leading to a head-on collision.
According to Google, the incident happened in Mountain View, close to the Google Head Quarters.
In a statement, Google said: “We clearly bear some responsibility, because if our car hadn’t moved, there wouldn’t have been a collision.
“That said, our test driver believed the bus was going to slow or stop to allow us to merge into the traffic, and that there would be sufficient space to do that.”
Google’s self-driving cars are plying in different states of the US and collectively have successfully completed over a million miles of the ride. Even though some cars have met with what Google calls “fender benders” (small accidents) none of those were due to the failure of the google’s automated system.
Google maintains monthly reports that include any traffic incidents that their self-driving cars have been involved in and February report published on Tuesday read “The Google AV [autonomous vehicle] test driver saw the bus approaching in the left side mirror but believed the bus would stop or slow to allow the Google AV to continue.”
“Approximately three seconds later, as the Google AV was re-entering the centre of the lane it made contact with the side of the bus.”
“The Google AV was operating in autonomous mode and travelling at less than two mph, and the bus was travelling at about 15mph at the time of contact.”
The presence of a few stacks of sandbags reportedly confused the Google’s system and now it plans to make minor tweaks in the algorithm to avoid such incidents in the future.
“From now on, our cars will more deeply understand that buses (and other large vehicles) are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles, and we hope to handle situations like this more gracefully in the future.”
On the flipside, if the California Department of Motor Vehicles finds Google self-drive car the real culprit in the accident, it could be the first major black mark in the X company’s self-driving cars project, which started in 2010.
The mishap happened just four days after the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gave Google a positive nod saying that it would likely give the self-driving computer the same legal status as a human driver.
As of June 2015, Google self-driving cars have been involved in 14 minor accidents but only in one incident did the passengers inside the vehicle got injured. That incident happened in July 2015 when three Google employees suffered minor injuries after a car whose driver failed to brake at a traffic light crashed into the rear of the Google vehicle.