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Google has said it will learn from an accident between one of its self-driving cars and a bus.
The crash happened when the car pulled out to avoid some sandbags in the road.
The car, and the Google driver monitoring its actions, assumed the bus would let the car in – but it didn’t and they collided.
No-one was injured in the low-speed accident on February 14.
Google submitted a written report to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. It read: “We clearly bear some responsibility, because if our car hadn’t moved there wouldn’t have been a collision.”
The car’s left front struck the right side of the bus. The car was travelling at 2mph, the bus at 15mph.
Google says the crash came from the same kind of negotiations and misunderstandings that take place between human drivers every day.
The tech giant says its cars will now have a better understanding that buses and other large vehicles are less likely to give way than smaller ones. Engineers have changed the software to include this consideration.
Google is currently testing 24 Lexus SUVs fitted with sensors and cameras as self-driving cars. They operate near the firm’s headquarters in Silicon Valley.
Its cars have been involved in nearly a dozen collisions in or around Mountain View since starting to test on city streets in the spring of 2014. In most cases, Google’s cars were rear-ended. No-one has been seriously injured.
