“Driving too slowly? Bet humans don’t get pulled over for that too often”, Google said.
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The MVPD “meets regularly” with Google to ensure that their vehicles operate safely in the city, the statement said.
Google added the the self-driving smart cars’ record of traveling for 1.2 million miles, which is equivalent to a human’s driving experience of 90 years, remains untouched.
The car’s defense – its speed limit is set at 25 miles per hour for “safety reasons”, according to a Google+ page. “We want them to feel friendly and approachable, rather than zooming scarily through neighborhood streets”, the post informs. The auto was stopped by cops and when they searched for the driver to hand him tickets they were perplexed to find no driver at all in the small Google vehicle. But one local police officer must have been out sick the day the department covered autonomous vehicles.
However, in this case, the Google vehicle was in compliance with another law. Maybe you just turn on your sirens and hope the passenger tells the auto to do so. No ticket was issued.
The police officer, once realizing that there was no human in the vehicle, “made contact with the operators” to “educate the operators about impeding traffic”.
The question of driver responsibility – for cars that aren’t being driven by drivers – has been a big part of the conversation around autonomous vehicles. Along with Apple and Uber, Google is at the top of the companies developing these type of technologies. After getting closer to it he noticed that there was no one actually driving the auto.
The search engine giant has said that alike the officer, the operators of these vehicles have been flagged down by many people, who are interested in the vehicles, but it hasn’t violated any laws so far.
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A Google self-driving auto travels eastbound on San Antonio Road in Mountain View, Calif., on Wednesday, October 22, 2015.
