Google’s Self-Driving Car Crashes

One of Google's ego-driving cars got into an accident earlier this week. Only Google is claiming the auto-pilot-equipped Prius was actually flipped into manual mode when the fortuity happened, making this a case of drug user error.

google car — Fortuity is investigated. Photo: Jalopnik

The news initially came from a Jalopnik reader who sent the auto web log a photo of the wing-breaking ball with other Prius come on Google's Loads View, Golden State headquarters. The accident appears to be minor and no one was hurt, judging by the photo. Jalopnik and many other websites reportable the incident as the "first caused by Google's self-driving car," which prompted a quick response from a Google spokesperson.

In a instruction sent to Patronage Insider, that spokesperson clarified that the car (and Google's software) wasn't to blame for the Prius-on-Prius accident; its device driver was.

"Safety is our top priority. One of our goals is to preclude fender-benders comparable this one, which occurred while a someone was manually dynamical the car," the spokesperson said.

Google's self-driving cars practice a combination of video cameras, radar sensors, and laser range finders to see other cars and rely on Google Maps and Solid ground to voyage the road, Google Software Engineer Sebastian Thrun says in a blog post in October 2010. He too points unstylish that the autonomous cars had trained drivers and software engineers inside during testing.

Naturally if an accident were to occur while the railcar was in car-pilot, it could have some serious problems for Google's visualise. Let's go out on a limb and hypothesize that the elevator car was to darned, even partially. It would constitute much easier for Google to have an employee take the fall rather than the software package. Not to mention that it would probably close to unbearable to shew otherwise.

CNET's Chris Matyszczyk asked a few of those tough questions in a post earlier today:

"And, though Google might–in a socialistic-brained mode–want America to conceive that is human erroneous belief, its deftly phrased spokes-quote didn't suggest there was some error in the least," he wrote. "So the 'somebody' was 'manually driving the car.' But no Wor connected whether the 'person' made a misidentify. Or whether the car did."

Matyszczyk asked Google to release more information on the incident to try to nark the bottom of the situation. Google simply offered one extra bit of information: the gondola's logs confirmed it was in manual of arms mode.

(See also Google's Self-Driving Cars: A Ride Down Memory Lane.")