[Cinci-nfb] Google Self-Driving Car Pulled Over by Police

[Deborah Kendrick]

The self-driving pod caught the attention of traffic police while it was
trundling down a street in California.
Google 
Police pulled over one of Google's self-driving cars
<http://www.cnet.com/news/google-takes-next-gen-autonomous-cars-to-the-stree
ts/>  on Thursday for driving slowly in Mountain View, California, where the
company has its headquarters -- but there was no traffic infraction.
The cartoonishly curvacious vehicle was driving 24 miles per hour in a 35
mph zone, police said, and was pulled over after a traffic officer noticed
traffic backing up behind it.
"As the officer approached the slow moving car he realized it was a Google
autonomous vehicle," Mountain View Police Department wrote in a blog post
<http://mountainviewpoliceblog.com/2015/11/12/inquiring-minds-want-to-know/>
. "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
<http://www.cnet.com/tags/self-driving-cars/>  are the future. But
developing the technology is only one step along the road. Drivers,
legislators and engineers also will have to reckon with issues like
car-crash ethical choices
<http://www.cnet.com/news/self-driving-car-advocates-tangle-with-messy-moral
ity/> , insurance coverage and, as here, law enforcement. For traffic
violations, Google has said
<http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/googles-self-driving-
cars-have-never-gotten-a-ticket/371172/>  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 -- many automakers are currently researching their own
self-driving vehicles. Toyota has said that it hopes to make self-driving
cars commercially available by 2020
<http://www.cnet.com/news/toyota-expects-to-have-self-driving-cars-for-sale-
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
<http://www.cnet.com/news/self-driving-cars-will-rule-the-roads-in-2030-says
-internet-of-things-visionary/> .

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