After the trials in Mountain View, California, the city of Austin, Texas, was picked by Google as the second location to test its self-driving vehicles. On the roads of Mountain View, where the company has its headquarters, Google's self-driving cars were involved in two accidents during June. However, the accidents were not caused by a glitch in car's software but rather by humans driving the other vehicles.
The company announced Tuesday that one of its self-driving Lexus sport utility vehicles is already on Austin's streets. For the tests, Google's autonomous vehicle is driving around a few square miles north of downtown Austin and still has a driver onboard.
It is not clear yet if Google will only test in Austin its self-driven Lexus model or whether the autonomous prototype in development will be tested there as well. Google also did not mention if the traffic authorities in Texas and Austin have given their blessing to the road test.
Texas, as the other American states, doesn't have yet some special road laws regulating the testing or using of autonomous vehicles. When state politicians in Texas proposed recently legislation encouraging testing of driverless cars only under some government oversight, an automotive industry trade group as well as Google opposed the measure.
By expending the trial area beyond Mountain View, the public road tests of its proprietary self-driving technology will allow Google to test its software in a location with different driving situations, traffic patterns, and road conditions.
This is not the first time when Google's self-driving Lexus is trying to cruise around Austin's streets. In the year 2013, during a conference of the state's department of transportation, Google tried to obtain permission to operate its autonomous car. But the state officials and the city of Austin did not grant their request at the time.
As to date, Google's fleet of autonomous cars is up to 48 vehicles, which makes the owner of the most popular search engine also the largest operator of self-driving vehicles in the state of California, where the company's headquarters are located. Since the company began testing autonomous vehicles in the year 2009, Google's cars have been involved in "14 "minor" accidents. However, in each incident Google claims that human error, rather than its driverless proprietary technology, was to blame.
The number of autonomous Google cars allowed on public streets has more than doubled last month, permitting its fleet to undergo a major expansion. With 48 self-driven cars, Google owns now more than half of the autonomous vehicles legal in the state of California. The additional 25 permits for operating driverless cars secured by Google are for its new fleet of prototype cars that will be tested on private roads.
The cars are designed for neighborhood driving, are tiny two-seaters with a top speed of only 25 miles per hour. It is expected that Google's new prototype driverless car to hit public streets sometime soon, this summer.
