any other Google Self-riding car fascinated by Minor Accident, This Time With accidents

For six years, Google has been testing self-riding automotive prototypes on the streets of Mountain View, with 14 reviews of adlescent accidents. previous this month, alternatively, one such collision left its three passengers with minor whiplash, the company suggested Thursday. This used to be the first time a crash involving a Google automotive resulted in accidents.

In a weblog submit on Medium, Chris Urmson, lead of the company’s self-driving-automobile mission, is quick to indicate that 11 out of the 14 earlier incidents had been due to rear-endings—and that this time was no different. As Urmson writes, the blame can also be positioned squarely on the very human driver steerage the auto in the back of Google’s prototype:

Our self-driving automobiles are being hit especially ceaselessly by way of other drivers who’re distracted and now not listening to the road. That’s a major motivator for us. essentially the most contemporary collision, throughout the evening rush hour on July 1, is an ideal example. one in all our Lexus automobiles used to be riding autonomously towards an intersection in Mountain View, CA. the sunshine used to be inexperienced, but visitors was backed up on the a long way aspect, so three automobiles, together with ours, braked and got here to a cease so as to not get caught in the course of the intersection. After we’d stopped, a car slammed into the back of us at 17 mph — and it hadn’t braked at all.

The Google automobile allegedly braked in most cases, and left sufficient room for the automobile at the back of to come back to a stop as smartly. The incident is re-created in a simulation video:

Urmson claims that every accident has been the result of “human error and inattention”; he says that now not a single collision thus far has been because of certainly one of Google’s self-riding cars. “We’ll take all this as a sign that we’re beginning to evaluate favorably with human drivers,” he adds.

In different words, the robots additionally beat us within the using division, as Urmson notes: “Our self-driving vehicles can be aware of tons of of objects without delay, 360 levels in all directions, and so they by no means get drained, irritable, or distracted.”

[by the use of ABC news]