The driverless car was pulled over by a police officer.
While the technology might still be in its infancy, the concept of owning a car that can drive all on its own without human intervention has been gradually becoming a reality over the last few years.
At the forefront of this brave new world is Internet search giant Google which has been developing and testing a variety of driverless car technologies on the streets of Mountain View, California.
One of this week’s trial runs didn’t quite go according to plan however when the car was pulled over by a policeman because it was only travelling at 24mph in a 35mph zone.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles described the car as “overly-cautious” and detailed how an officer had “noticed traffic backing up behind a slow-moving car in the eastbound lane.”
“The officer stopped the car and made contact with the operators to learn more about how it was choosing speeds along certain roadways and to educate the operators about impeding traffic,” the department wrote in a report about the incident.
Google has received complaints before about the “excessively polite” nature of its autonomous vehicles and has vowed to improve their performance by making them drive “more humanistically.”
With over 90% of road accidents attributed to human error, some experts believe that a world dominated by self-driving cars would be a much safer place to live in.
Whether that will actually happen anytime soon however remains to be seen.
