One of the "Google Cars", involved in a traffic accident

The American giant Google has, among its many projects, one focused on the future of personal mobility.

It is a fleet of “Google Cars”, vehicles equipped with autonomous driving systems. Today, one of these smart cars was involved in an accident with three injured people, fortunately none of them seriously.

The “Google driverless car” is a project by the American company, several years in the making, that aims to advance the next step in personal mobility: autonomous driving. These are ordinary vehicles to which Google adds camera and radar systems so that they know exactly where they are in relation to their surroundings.

Currently, these vehicles, normally mounted on Toyota or Lexus cars, continue to drive on the roads of several American states, including Nevada, which in mid-2011 passed a law allowing them to operate on open public roads. In total, these vehicles have already covered more than 2.5 million km, designed primarily for environments such as motorways.

However, today’s news concerns a minor setback the American company has had with one of its cars, as it was involved in an accident—the fourteenth—in which there were injuries, although fortunately, according to Google itself, none of them is serious.

It seems that a Google Car—based on a Lexus RX450h—was driving normally through the streets of Mountain View, California, when at an intersection, despite having a green light, it stopped, since not all the traffic on its right had yet passed, which would have forced it to stop in the middle of the intersection.

For this reason, the Google car stopped to wait, something the driver directly behind it did not notice; he failed to brake in time and ended up colliding at 27 km/h with the Google car. Fortunately, none of the 3 occupants of the Lexus suffered serious injuries.

Google states that, as with the other accidents suffered by its autonomous cars, the fault is attributable to the human driver, which leaves us in a somewhat doubtful position as we regularly drive through the streets of our cities and the motorways of our country.

Source | businessinsider.com