Google Self-Driving Car Collides With Bus

One of Google's self-driving cars hit a bus, and if it is found to be at fault-which is looking probable-it will be the first time one of the company's autonomous vehicles is responsible for an accident on the road.

Following a Valentine's Day collision between a bus and an autonomous auto in Silicon Valley, Google engineers have reportedly refined the vehicle's software to better "understand" the sometimes bullying nature of public transportation. It was posted Monday on the DMV website. "The Lexus smacked into the side of the bus at low speed, damaging its front fender, wheel and sensor in the process". The Google robot vehicle moved back toward the center of the lane to go around the sand bags and sideswiped the bus, which was passing, the report says. "That said, our test driver believed the bus was going to slow or stop to allow us to merge into the traffic, and that there would be sufficient space to do that". No one was injured, and the report does not put a party at fault.

After pulling towards the right, the vehicle "detected sandbags near a storm drain blocking its path, so it needed to come to a stop", according to an advance copy of Google's February self-driving monthly report, provided to PCMag on Monday.

No one was injured, according to an accident report Google wrote and submitted to California's Department of Motor Vehicles.

It's a weird fringe case, but it's exactly these fringe cases that makes building self-driving cars so damned hard. In early January Google released a DMV-required "disengagement report" revealing that the self-driving technology failed 341 times in 15 months.

Google is betting that its efforts will lead to a future when a large number of cars on the road will drive themselves, and has been testing autonomous vehicles on streets near its headquarters for the past few years.

A spokesman for the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration declined to comment.

Google's driverless vehicles have been involved in accidents before, but this is the first instance in which the company is admitting fault - or at least sharing fault.

"An internal VTA investigation is still going on, there are several pieces of information that need to be examined, so no determination of liability has been made", spokeswoman Stacey Hendler Ross said in a written statement.