Chris Urmson, head of Google’s driverless car program, has said that human errors are to blame for the multiple crashes involving Google self-driving cars.
In an online blog post, Urmson spoke out about a recent incident that took place on July 1st, which saw a Google self-driving car rear-ended by a human-driven vehicle.
Urmson said: “Our self-driving cars are being hit surprisingly often by other drivers who are distracted and not paying attention to the road. That’s a big motivator for us.”
The incident took place during rush hour on July 1st in Mountain View, California and saw an autonomously-driven Lexus slow down at a set of traffic lights. Another vehicle then drove behind it and failed to slow down in time, hitting the driverless car at 17mph.
Urmson added: “Thankfully, everyone in both vehicles was okay, except for a bit of minor whiplash, and a few scrapes on our bumper. The other vehicle wasn’t so lucky; its entire front bumper fell off.”
Since they were introduced back in 2009, Google driverless cars have been involved in 14 collisions – 11 of which were rear-enders – but none of them were caused by the driverless vehicle involved.
Urmson ended his online comments on the recent incident by saying: “We’ll take all this as a signal that we’re starting to compare favourably with human drivers.”
