Is Google at fault for its self-driving car crash?
Google said it would take 鈥渟ome responsibility鈥� for a minor collision in February聽involving聽one of its driverless cars and a municipal bus.聽
Although Google鈥檚 autonomous vehicles have been involved at least 17 collisions, none of them serious, in its six years of testing on public roads, other drivers were at fault for all but one. And that case involved a Google employee who was in control of the car at the time of the incident.
鈥� of the accident,鈥� Google said in May. At that time, the driverless cars had traveled safely for more than 1.8 million miles.
The collision that marked the Google cars鈥� first misstep occurred on Feb. 14 in Mountain View, Calif., near Google headquarters. The car, a Lexus RX450h, attempted to turn in the right lane at an intersection when it found its route blocked by sandbags around a storm drain. The vehicle then had to re-enter the center lane in order to make the turn, which it did without recognizing that a public transit bus was already driving in that lane. The car , damaging the Google car鈥檚 left front fender, wheel, and sensor.
No one was injured, according to the official accident report filed by Google. The Google car was traveling less than 2 miles per hour, while the bus driving down the center lane was moving at 15 mph.
Google accepted the blame, but said that the collision could have been prevented by the car鈥檚 test driver.
鈥�, because if our car hadn鈥檛 moved, there wouldn鈥檛 have been a collision,鈥� Google said Monday, reported Reuters. 鈥淭hat 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.鈥�
A spokeswoman for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority said it will investigate the February incident to determine liability.
The non-profit consumer interest group Consumer Watchdog, long a critic of Google鈥檚 driverless car program, seized on the incident.
鈥淭his accident is more proof that , and a human driver needs to be able to takeover when something goes wrong,鈥� said John M. Simpson, the group鈥檚 consumer advocate, in a statement. 鈥淕oogle鈥檚 one-paragraph account of what caused it to drive into a bus is not good enough to inform new rules of the road for robot cars.鈥�
Google announced in January that between September 2014 and November 2015, test drivers in its cars had to take control of the vehicles on 341 occasions. While 272 of those times were due to technical glitches, the remaining 69 were based on drivers' decisions to avoid potential collisions.
In response to the crash, Google has said it made modifications to its cars鈥� programming after running simulations based on 鈥渢housands鈥� of variations of last month鈥檚 collision.
鈥淔rom 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,鈥� Google said.
