Emerging Technologies Blog

credit to + for capturing the moment.

In May, one of our ardent readers who resides in California shared his own take on the behavior of Google fully autonomous cars among other drivers and road users in the state. In his piece, which, of course, went viral after we published it, the Californian resident wrote that Google driverless cars drive like your grandma.

That's because ''they're never the first off the line at a stop light, they don't accelerate quickly, they don't speed, and they never take any chances with lane changes'' and drive slowly at locations where they can't see clearly in order to get their bearing right, according to the poster. However this act piss off other drivers because Google cars sometimes cause traffic congestion. And one of them was pulled over on Thursday for this same reason.

Mountain View Police Department revealed in a blog post Thursday that one of its traffic police ordered a Google self-driving car  that was being tested on Californian roads to move to the side of the road for driving 25 miles per hour in a 35 miles per hour zone and, as a result,the driverless electric vehicle was building up traffic as other cars waited behind for it to go. In other words, the Google car was driving slowly.

Audi self-driving car

According to the MVPD, the officer noticed traffic stacking up behind a white koala vehicle. So he walked up to the vehicle  responsible for this but realized it was a Google self-driving car that was the real culprit. He then pulled over the Google autonomous car and spoke with the safety driver 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 Google self-driving cars operate under the Neighborhood Electric Vehicle Definition per 385.5 of the California Vehicle Code and can only be operated on roadways with speed limits at or under 35 mph. In this case, it was lawful for the car to be traveling on the street as El Camino Real is rated at 35 mph.

Google itself confirmed the incident in  a post on its project handle on Plus and noted that human drivers get away with it or not pulled over for this.Google also said that it decided to make its car that drive themselves at 25 MPH for security reasons(like being approachable). It also boasted that officers like the one that pull over its car  on Thursday do so when they want to learn more about