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Cars

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In August 2011, on one of the main roads that runs through Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, a Prius—one of the cars in Google’s fleet of autonomous vehicles—caused a fender-bender.

The accident happened, naturally, because there was a human behind the wheel.

That's according to a new report by Google about its self-driving car project, a document that tallies every accident since it began testing its 32 vehicles on the roads in 2009. That sounds like it could be a massive dataset, considering the tens of thousands of accidents that happen on American roadways each year. It actually isn’t: “In the six years of our project, we’ve been involved in 12 minor accidents during more than 1.8 million miles of autonomous and manual driving combined,” Google wrote. “Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.”

Not once! In the case of the fender bender four summers ago, a Google employee—yes, a human—was to blame. He had borrowed the car to run a quick errand and ended up rear-ending another car. (“He was not using the vehicle to test our autonomous technology,” Google wrote, and the car ended up sustaining “some damage.”) So what ended up being probably a pretty bad day for that Google employee—imagine telling your boss you crashed the driverless car—turns out to be a tidy example of the key difference between human drivers and algorithmic ones. Namely: Robots are much, much better drivers than humans.

Google’s descriptions of the other accidents involving its self-driving cars reiterates that point. Its cars were rear-ended eight times, merged into once, and struck from the side once. One other collision that didn't cause any damage involved a non-Google car’s mirror grazing the side sensor of an automated Lexus. (One of Google’s cars was again rear-ended last week, Ars Technica reports.)

Google’s latest report, which it says

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