Google on Monday said it bears ‘some responsibility’ after its self-driving car crashed into a public bus on a Silicon Valley street.
According to a report in which the company does not address fault, said in a statement, “We clearly bear some responsibility, because if our car hadn’t moved there wouldn’t have been a collision.”
Google accepted some responsibility for the collision, which occurred on Valentine’s Day when one of the Lexus SUVs it has outfitted with sensors and cameras hit the side of the bus near the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.
No one was injured (according to an accident report) Google wrote and submitted to the California Department of Motor Vehicles.
As per the report, Google’s car intended to turn right off a major boulevard when it detected sandbags around a storm drain at the intersection.
The right lane was wide enough to let some cars turn and others go straight, but the car (a Lexus) needed to slide to its left within the right lane to get around the obstruction.
It was going 2 mph when it made the move and its left front struck the right side of the bus, which was going straight at 15 mph.
The car’s test driver — who under state law must be in the front seat to grab the wheel when needed — thought the bus would yield and did not have control before the collision, Google said.
Google cars have been involved in nearly a dozen collisions in or around Mountain View since starting to test on city streets in the spring of 2014. In most cases, Google’s cars were rear-ended. No one has been seriously injured.