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Human takes wheel of self-driving Google car, rear-ends another PriusAug 05, 2011 (Palo Alto Daily News - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Maybe Google should let its cars do all the driving. The blog Jalopnik posted photographs Friday of a Google "self-driving" Prius -- obvious because of the silver, futuristic gadgetry mounted on its roof -- moments after it apparently had rear-ended another Prius. The hybrids appeared to be on East Charleston Road in Mountain View, behind Costco; a police officer and other drivers are shown surveying the scene. "Perhaps the complicated set of lasers and imaging systems that Google chief autonomous car researcher Sebastian Thrun called 'the perfect driving mechanism' thought it was just looking at its shadow," Jalopnik quipped. But the last laugh is on humans, not the autonomous cars. A Google spokesperson told The Daily News that a person was actually driving the car in manual mode when the minor collision happened earlier this week. Even though the cars can drive themselves, they legally must have a human at the wheel in the event something goes awry. The autos, however, apparently aren't advanced enough to take over when their human drivers err. "Safety is our top priority," a spokesperson said in a statement. "One of our goals is to prevent fender-benders like this one, which occurred while a person was manually driving the car." The self-driving cars have logged 160,000 miles without an incident, the spokesperson added. Google's secret project to build the self-driving cars came to light last fall. The New York Times reported in October that the company had equipped six Priuses and an Audi TT with a rotating sensor that creates a three-dimensional map of the cars' surroundings and a video camera that detects traffic lights and moving objects such as pedestrians. Google said the cars have driven down San Francisco's Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and navigated the Pacific Coast Highway. "We've always been optimistic about technology's ability to advance society, which is why we have pushed so hard to improve the capabilities of self-driving cars beyond where they are today," Thrun said in a Google blog post. "While this project is very much in the experimental stage, it provides a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the future thanks to advanced computer science. And that future is very exciting." Email Diana Samuels at [email protected]. To see more of Palo Alto Daily News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.paloaltodailynews.com. Copyright (c) 2011, Palo Alto Daily News, Calif. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For more information about the content services offered by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (MCT), visit www.mctinfoservices.com. |