Google Car pulled over by traffic cop in California!
A Google Car was pulled over by police in Mountain View, California, due to the traffic build-up behind the self-driving vehicle! The reason for this, was that the car was driving too slow!
The Google Car is set to drive at very low speeds and they’ve stated that,
“We’ve capped the speed of our prototype vehicles at 40km/h for safety reasons. We want them to feel friendly and approachable, rather than zooming scarily through neighbourhood streets.”
The safety concerns that they have are more to do with humans interacting with the Google Car, rather than the vehicle hitting other cars or pedestrians. They’ve opted to go for the overly cautious route, initially anyway, which I think is the right idea.
When the officer approached the Google Car and saw no one driving, he decided not to take any action! In a post on Google+, they joked,
“We bet humans don’t get pulled over for that too often.”
An accident report that was recently filed by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, has described the autonomous Google Car as being “overly cautious”.
The Google Car was travelling at 38km/h in a 56km/h zone and Google have stated that they are actually working towards making the car more “humanistic” in the vehicle’s driving behaviour. Following complaints of the Google Car being too polite!
How autonomous cars will change the way we drive!
Google’s fleet of self-driving vehicles are set to follow the rules of the road precisely. The problem that self-driving vehicles face is not interacting with other vehicles or obeying the rules of the road, they can handle this very well. The issue is interacting with other road users, who do not always obey the rules of the road and act in a way that the Google Car or other autonomous vehicles, cannot predict or anticipate.
Statistics suggest that 90% of all car accidents are caused by human error and most experts acknowledge that self-driving cars will drastically reduce the number of road traffic accidents.
Google also stated in the post about the incident, that after 1.2 million miles of autonomous driving, no Google Car has ever received a ticket!
People need to get used to the idea of sharing the roads with autonomous vehicles before they will become fully viable for consumer use. That’s still a few years away though and millions more miles of autonomous driving tests!
Source: IOL