Google self-driving car stopped by police for driving too slowly
In what appears to be the cars’ first run-in with the law, one of the little pods was pulled over for doing 24mph on a 35mph road
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Your support makes all the difference.One of Google’s fleet of self-driving cars has been pulled over by police, after raising suspicion for driving too slow.
The car was stopped by a policeman on a motorcycle on a public road near Google’s campus in Mountain View, in California. The police said that the attention was brought because the car was driving at 24mph on a 35mph road.
Google’s cars only go on roads up to 35mph. Google keeps the cars from going any faster than 25mph in order to crashes.
The law in California prohibits driving too slow, as many other places do. The law is intended to stop people from holding up traffic.
The relevant law says that “No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic, unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, because of a grade, or in compliance with law.”
The Mountain View police department said that the car had been stopped so that the police could find out more about what the car was doing.
“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,” a spokesperson said.
The police said that the car was not breaking the law since it was on a sufficiently slow road. It stressed that it regularly meets with Google to ensure that its fleet of self-driving cars — which have together done millions of miles on the roads around Google’s campus — are driving around safely.
Google’s cars have been involved in a number of crashes since they took to the road, but says that the cars are never at fault and tend to be involved in crashes when humans drive into the back of them. After the first injury happened in July of this year, Google said that such crashes showed the importance of developing the self-driving cars so that crashes could be avoided.
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