A police officer pulled over a slow-moving car in Mountain View, Calif. Thursday, only to find out that there was no human driver. It was one of Google’s self-driving vehicles.
The officer singled out Google’s car for traveling 24 mph in a 35 mph zone, according to the Mountain View Police Department’s blog, and planned to inform the driver that traveling slow enough to impede traffic violates California’s traffic laws. Instead, after discovering the vehicle was autonomous, the officer “made contact with the operators to learn more about how the car was choosing speeds.”
In a post on its Google+ page, Google said that its self-driving cars have never received a traffic ticket. “We’ve capped the speed of our prototype vehicles at 25mph for safety reasons,” the company wrote. “We want them to feel friendly and approachable, rather than zooming scarily through neighborhood streets.”
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