Google has confirmed that its self-driving cars have encountered 11 crashes. According to the Internet giant, none of the incidents were the cars' fault.
Google's self-driving car director Chris Urmson described the accidents as "light damage and no injuries... during those 1.7 million miles of autonomous and manual driving with our safety drivers behind the wheel, and not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident."
According to Urmson, their cars would get hit while waiting for the traffic light to change. So even when the driverless car is equipped with sensors and software that can "detect a sticky situation" and take the necessary action, they would have to realize, deal, and find solutions to the realities of traffic on a day to day basis, which involves speed and distance.
He also pointed out that since light damages such as those experienced by their cars are often not reported to the authorities and are not included in official statistics, unlike major road accidents.
"One of the most important things we need to understand in order to judge our cars' safety performance is "baseline" accident activity on typical suburban streets," Urmson said. "We need to find out how often we can expect to get hit by other drivers."
Here's a peak at the self-driving car in action:
The Google driverless car program director also shared some patterns their team has seen while driving on California roads.
The most frequent traffic accidents in the United States are rear-end crashes. He shares that the Google car was hit seven times from the rear, mostly during change in traffic lights. Urmson also mentioned that the autonomous vehicle was also hit by a car that didn't mind the red light.
Then there are drivers who are not paying attention to the road or their driving. "In any given daylight moment in America, there are 660,000 people behind the wheel who are checking their devices instead of watching the road," he shares.
After California has lifted its ban against self-driving vehicles, people have spotted the Internet search engine's cars on the streets since September last year.
Apart from leading Google's self-driving car program, Chris Urmson is also an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University and was the Director of Technology for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge champion.
