Google reports first accident involving its self-driving car

Google Inc yesterday revealed that one of its self-driving car prototypes was involved in an injury accident for the first time.

The collision involved a Lexus SUV that the company had fitted with sensors and cameras in Google's home city of Mountain View, where over 20 prototypes had been self-manoeuvring through traffic.

The three Google employees on board who sustained minor injuries went back to work after being checked out at a hospital, Google said. The driver of the other car also complained of neck and back pain.

In California, during testing of self-driving cars, a person must be behind the wheel to take control in an emergency. The practice at the search giant is to have another employee in the front passenger seat to record details of the ride on a laptop. There was in addition a back seat passenger in this case.

Google has made heavy investments in autonomous car technology, which it believes would be safer and more efficient than human drivers.

According to the company, this was the 14th accident in six years in about 1.9 million miles of testing. Google said that its cars had not caused any collisions, though in 2011 an employee who took a car to run an errand rear-ended another vehicle while the Google car was out of self-driving mode.

Google added, in 11 of the 14 accidents its car was rear-ended by another vehicle.

In an accident report Google filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles the company said, its SUV was travelling at about 15mph in self-driving mode behind two other cars as the group approached a junction with a green light.

The first car slowed to a stop so as not to block the junction as traffic on the far side was not moving. The Google car and the other car in front of it also stopped.

Chris Urmson, the head of Google's self-driving car programme, wrote in a blog posted yesterday, that his SUVs "are being hit surprisingly often" by distracted drivers, perhaps people looking at their phones.

"The clear theme is human error and inattention," Urmson wrote. "We'll take all this as a signal that we're starting to compare favorably with human drivers."