Google’s self-driving cars may be smart enough to navigate easily through roads on their own, but they are not advanced enough to avoid cops yet. On Wednesday, the head of Google’s rapid rollout lab, David E. Weekly, tweeted a picture showing Google’s prototype vehicle pulled over by a cop for driving too slowly.
No ticket given
Explaining the scene, Google said, “Driving too slowly? Bet humans don’t get pulled over for that too often.” While writing this, the company totally ignored the law that requires a human present in the driving seat all the time in the autonomous car.
The Google car was traveling at 24 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone, the Mountain View Police Department said. Since no rule was broken, there was no ticket issued to the car. “After 1.2 million miles of autonomous driving (that’s the human equivalent of 90 years of driving experience), we’re proud to say we’ve never been ticketed!” the blog post read.
In a blog post, Google said it has set a cap on the maximum speed for its self-driving cars at 25 miles per hour, adding that the decision was made with the intent of making the car appear feel friendly and approachable rather than “zooming scarily” through streets in the neighborhood.
The Mountain View police department said that it was lawful for the car to travel slowly for ensuring the safety of all. Officers further informed the public that their department regularly meets with Google representatives to make sure that when their vehicles operate in their community, they take safety into consideration.
Google car – a wonder on the road
Research earlier this year suggested that the possibility of crashing is higher with self-driving vehicles as compared to regular cars. However, the scientists who conducted the study put a few caveats in their report which render their findings almost useless. The scientists noted that the autonomous vehicles are prototypes and the data set is small.
There is no evidence to prove that in any of the accidents involving the autonomous cars, they are at fault. This suggests that the traffic on the road proceeding towards these cars to take a look at these wonders might actually be responsible for such incidents. The police too get affected by the impulse to take a closer look at Google’s autonomous cars. Google said it often happens that people flag down the self-driving cars because of curiosity regarding their project.
