Google denied the report from the international news agency Reuters that its two self-driving prototype cars had a near-miss collision in Silicon Valley, Calif.
The report, released by Reuters on Thursday, states that the incident happened on San Antonio Road in Palo Alto. The story source, John Absmeier, director of Delphi's Silicon Valley lab and global business director for the company's automated driving program, was a passenger of one of the cars and narrated that the other self-driving car cut off his vehicle while preparing to change lanes. Luckily, his car "took appropriate action."
Absmeier was aboard the prototype Audi Q5 crossover vehicle equipped with lasers, radar, cameras and special computer software. The other prototype was a Lexus RX400h crossover that has similar equipment and software.
Delphi then released a statement on Friday denying the incident.
"The story was taken completely out of context when describing a type of complex driving scenario that can occur in the real world. Our expert provided an example of a lane change scenario that our car recently experienced which, coincidentally, was with one of the Google cars also on the road at that time. It wasn't a 'near miss' as described in the Reuters story," the company wrote to The Washington Post.
Google released an incident report last month detailing that they had recorded 11 minor accidents since the self-driving car was first introduced on the road.
"Over the 6 years since we started the project, we've been involved in 11 minor accidents (light damage, no injuries) during those 1.7 million miles of autonomous and manual driving with our safety drivers behind the wheel, and not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident," Chris Urmson, head of Google's self-driving car project, wrote in a blog post.
