Well, we know one thing Google’s adorable panda-like autonomous pod car is not: a speed demon. Photographer Zandr Milewski nabbed this shot of the car having a run in with a motorcycle cop in Los Altos, California. Its offense? Driving too slowly.
Officials with the Mountain View Police Department said the car was pulled over for going 24 mph in a 35 mph zone and for backing up traffic. Police officials said the officer pulled the car over to ask how it chose speeds on certain roads and to educate the operators about impeding traffic.
In the end the car (or its human) did not get ticketed because according to police, it wasn’t technically breaking any laws—it was lawful for the car to be on the road it was on.
Here’s how Google’s Self-Driving Car Project responded on Google+, which BREAKING NEWS is apparently still a thing:
Driving too slowly? Bet humans don’t get pulled over for that too often.
We’ve capped the speed of our prototype vehicles at 25 mph for safety reasons. We want them to feel friendly and approachable, rather than zooming scarily through neighborhood streets.
Like this officer, people sometimes flag us down when they want to know more about our project. After 1.2 million miles of autonomous driving (that’s the human equivalent of 90 years of driving experience), we’re proud to say we’ve never been ticketed!
Makes you wonder what will happen to all that municipal revenue when the day comes, decades from now, perhaps, when most cars on the road are autonomous. I guess it’ll be up to us old-school speed freaks still clinging to our human-driven cars to provide all that money instead, and so speeding tickets will be $50,000 apiece.
The future looks bright!
Photo credit Zandr Milewski
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