In a blogpost about this week’s incident, the Mountain View police department said an officer “noticed traffic backing up behind a slow-moving vehicle in the eastbound lane”.
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According to the Mountain View Police Department in California, the auto was traveling at 24 miles per hour in a 35 miles per hour zone. Google says this is relatively common – folks wondering how the vehicle works.
Google’s self-driving cars are legally allowed to drive on California roads with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour (56 kilometres per hour) and under. The officer was primarily curious about how the auto operated, and it wasn’t in violation of any law.
Despite having travelled 1.2 million miles since the project’s inception, Google’s fleet of autonomous vehicles has reportedly never received a traffic citation. In this case, the passenger spoke on behalf of the smart auto.
The self-driving cars that Google has been testing on California’s roads and highways were involved in 11 minor accidents over the past six years, according to the company.
Google re-posted the picture on its Google+ page and acknowledged the incident, adding that its self-driving cars have yet to get a ticket.
After realizing that it was an autonomous vehicle of Google’s, the policeman contacted the operators and “educated them about impeding traffic”.
The co-pilot told Milewski that “apparently MVPD (Mountain View Police Department) doesn’t get NEVs (Neighborhood Electric Vehicles) and pulled them over to ask why they were all going so slow”.
“Self-driving cars are programmed to stop at red lights and stop signs”, says an article in Slate addressing several scenarios associated with autonomous vehicles. No ticket was issued and the driver-less auto was let off with a warning.
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“Like this officer, people sometimes flag us down when they want to know more about our project”.
