I don’t know which is more surprising: that Google has robot cars, or that they have had them for over a year and none of them have gotten into an accident until now.

On August 6, 2011 the Google Prius rear-ended several other cars, including another Toyota Prius. Google says that the robot is not at fault because the accidents occurred when the human driver was manually controlling the vehicle. All the accidents were minor fender benders and no one was injured.

Apparently, Google has been building and testing the cars since sometime last year.  Google stated that they have tested them in San Francisco, along the Pacific Coast Highway and around Lake Tahoe. It’s not clear if they have gone nationwide as of yet, but as of October 2010, they had logged over 140,000 miles on the test cars.

The cars aren’t completely unmanned: each vehicle has one driver, and a software engineer in the passenger seat. But the cars do run on autopilot using radar sensors and laser range finders to navigate, in addition to the video cameras that they also use to record street maps.

And it sounds like Google’s plan is to someday take robot car technology mainstream. According to an article written by Sebastian Thrun, of Google:

“Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time… so we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves.”

Well, alright then. My only question is, does the software engineer come standard?

Metier Law Firm – Denver Accident Attorneys