The vehicle was rear-ended by another driver that had supposedly been driving while distracted.
It looks as though the Google self-driving car road tests are not being blessed with all that much luck, as yet another one has now been involved in a crash as it was rear ended by another vehicle while it had been stopped at a red light.
Only weeks after being rear ended twice while being stopped at a light, it has now happened again.
A few weeks ago, the Google self-driving car made a report to the California Department of Motor Vehicles had been struck on two separate occasions in the rear bumper while it had been stopped at a traffic light. Both of these collisions with the Lexus SUVs that are specially loaded with a tremendous number of sensors and controls occurred in Mountain View. Now, the company has, yet again, had to make a similar report.
Last week, it was reported that a motorist drove into the self-driving car while it was stopped at a light.
In that case, the crash was more serious than the two previous had been. The autonomous SUV had been completely stationary, and the vehicle that struck it had been traveling at a speed of about 17 mph. That resulted in minor whiplash to the passengers in both cars. The front bumper of the human-driven vehicle also fell off as a result of the crash.
Chris Urmson, the director of the self-driving vehicle project at Google, explained that “We’re seeing first-hand the true measure of how distraction is impacting driving.” He also pointed out that “None of our accidents rise to the level of police reports. So what we are experiencing is what the road is really like.”
This represents the fourteenth accident involving a Google self-driven car since 2009, when the vehicles were first used to driver around the headquarters of its own streets. Every single instance of a collision involving one of those vehicles, however, has been shown to be the fault of a human driver, not because of the self-driven SUV. That said, what is not yet known is whether a human would have taken evasive action, where the autonomous one did not.