A Google driverless car has crashed in to a passenger bus in California, with the tech giant accepting “some responsibility”.
The vehicle hit a bus on a street in Silicon Valley near the company’s headquarters during a testing exercise.
Google has admitted that it was partly responsible for the incident, which occurred last month. The accident is thought to be the first in which an autonomous car has hit another vehicle.
Nobody was injured when the Lexus SUV, fitted with sensors and cameras, knocked the side of the bus by Google’s offices in Mountain View, California. A report was submitted to the California Department of Motor Vehicles and was posted online yesterday.
The car was attempting to turn right off a major road, while navigating some sandbags around a storm drain. The right lane was wide enough to let some cars turn and others go straight, but the Lexus needed to slide to its left within the right lane to get around the obstruction.
Advertisement
The Lexus was moving at 2mph when it made the move, but its left front corner struck the right side of the bus, which was travelling straight ahead at 15mph.
According to Google, the test driver – who under state law must be in the front to grab the wheel if necessary — thought the bus would yield and did not gain control in time.
In a written statement Google said: “We clearly bear some responsibility, because if our car hadn’t moved there wouldn’t have been a collision.”
There have been previous accidents involving driverless cars, but this is the first time that Google has claimed any responsibility.
Chris Urmson, the head of the self-driving car project, said in a brief interview that he believesd the Lexus was moving before the bus started to pass.
Advertisement
“We saw the bus, we tracked the bus, we thought the bus was going to slow down, we started to pull out, there was some momentum involved,” Mr Urmson said.
None of the passengers on the bus were injured, according to the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority.
Google said it has made changes to its software to avoid future crashes.
“From now on, our cars will more deeply understand that buses (and other large vehicles) are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles, and we hope to handle situations like this more gracefully in the future”, Google added.