Police pulled over one of Google’s self-driving car last week because of the speed at which it was traveling, but there was no traffic infraction.
The vehicle was driving 38.6 km per hour in a 56.3 kmph zone in Mountain View, California, where the company has its headquarters. It was pulled over after a police officer noticed traffic backing up behind it. A picture was taken of the traffic stop by local Aleksandr Milewski and posted to Facebook shortly thereafter.
“As the officer approached the slow moving car he realised it was a Google autonomous vehicle,” the Mountain View Police Department wrote in a blog post. “The officer stopped the car and made contact with the operators to learn more about how the car was choosing speeds along certain roadways and to educate the operators about impeding traffic per 22400(a) of the California Vehicle Code.-"
The auto and computing industries believe self-driving cars are the future. Drivers, legislators and engineers also will have to reckon with issues like car-crash ethical choices, insurance coverage and, as here, law enforcement. For traffic violations, Google has said the company itself should be responsible for tickets.
Prototypes of Google’s self-driving bubble cars are not an uncommon sight on roads in Mountain View. But the company is not alone in experimenting with autonomous vehicles. Toyota has said that it hopes to make self-driving cars commercially available by 2020, and MIT's Kevin Ashton, who divined the concept of network-connected objects known as the Internet of Things, this week predicted the vehicles will be commonplace by 2030.
