Google accepts some blame for self-driving crash

The Google Self-Driving Car has not crashed for the first time, but it has indeed been the first ever “accident” as on nearly more than a dozen previous occasions, the car has indeed had accidents, but on most occasions they were hit from the behind.

Google said it has adjusted its self-driving software following a February 14 crash in which one of its autonomous 2012 Lexus RX 450h SUVs collided with a bus in Mountain View, California.

Google filed an accident report with California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, but did not specify where the blame lies. The autonomous vehicle’s operator saw a bus approaching in the left-hand mirror “but believed the bus would stop or slow to allow the Google AV [autonomous vehicle] to continue”, the report said.

Last month, the vehicle – which was travelling at 2mph – pulled out in front of a bus, which was going at 15mph. No one has been seriously injured.

Google said in November that in six years of its self-driving project, it has been involved in 17 minor accidents during more than 2 million miles of autonomous and manual driving combined.

The crash comes as Google has been making the case that it should be able to test vehicles without steering wheels and other controls.

According to the report, Google’s Auto meant to turn right off a major boulevard when it detected sandbags around a storm drain at the intersection.

Still, the collision could be the first time a Google vehicle in autonomous mode caused a crash.

The company also said it has reviewed this incident “and thousands of variations on it in our simulator in detail and made refinements to our software”. Google’s vehicle seemed to make the same decision that a human driver would have… it might just not have made it decisively enough for the bus to understand its intent. This type of misunderstanding happens between human drivers on the road every day. “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 said in a statement. But the bus did not yield, and the vehicles struck each other.

“Clearly Google’s robot cars can’t reliably cope with everyday driving situations”, said John M. Simpson of the non-profit Consumer Watchdog.