Google self-driving car hits public bus near company headquarters

The Valentine’s Day accident is feasibly the first time one of Google’s robo-carshas been involved in an accident it “caused”. It was posted Monday on the DMV website.

According to the report, the Google vehicle was waiting at an intersection to turn right when it encountered several sand bags blocking the lane.

Google wrote that its vehicle was trying to get around some sandbags on a street when it struck the right side of the bus. “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”. The bus was traveling at 15 miles per hour and Google’s vehicle was going 2 miles per hour.

The bus crash came just four days after a legal breakthrough for the self-driving project – the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google it would likely give the self-driving computer the same legal treatment as a human driver.

He acknowledged that Google’s auto did have some responsibility but said it was “not black and white”. Thankfully this was a minor accident that left only the vehicles damaged (Google’s front fender, wheel, and sensors were damaged in the process) with its occupants unharmed.

Google cars have been involved in almost a dozen collisions in or around Mountain View since starting to test on city streets in the spring of 2014. While many in the tech and auto industry have circled 2020 as a roll-out date for self-driving vehicles, others have warned it will likely take longer. No one has been seriously injured. The company says it’s reviewing the accident and teaching its cars (!) about the possibility of unyielding buses. A DMV spokeswoman said the agency hoped to speak with Google Monday about what went wrong.

Google had previously admitted that its vehicle “could” have been at least partly responsible for the collision.

One of Google’s autonomous cars.

The accident highlights the imperfections of the current self-driving technology, which is widely seen as a promising solution to the thousands of lives lost each year on roadways.

This story has been corrected to show that Google began testing on city streets in 2014, not 2015. “There needs to be a licensed driver who can takeover, even if in this case the test driver failed to step in as he should have”.

AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke contributed from San Francisco.