11 Crashes For Google's Autonomous Cars
Since the start of Google’s testing of autonomous vehicles back in 2009, their robot-driven cars have travelled more than a million kilometres on Californian roads. The State’s government implemented some laws concerning this technology in 2012 and then regulated autonomous vehicles some more in 2014.
One of these regulations forces every company that runs autonomous vehicles to disclose every crash their cars are involved in.
Google just announced their numbers: since they started tests, their cars were implicated in 11 crashes.
This may seem like a lot, but it’s important to point out a few things: in all the accidents, humans were driving; computers were never to blame. Collisions were minor, and nobody was hurt.
Google’s fleet include 23 vehicles, and collectively they have driven more than 1.7 million kilometres.
The other companies testing autonomous systems (like Delphi) were also involved in a few incidents, but nothing that could indicate a computer problem.