Three people were taken to hospital as a result of a car crash involving a Google self-drive Lexus SUV. Luckily for Google, it was just a bit of whiplash and they were all employees, which means no-one’s getting sued.

Before you start imagining I,Robot style mutinies, I should point out that it wasn’t actually because of a fault with the car. Just an idiot rear-ending them, no doubt whilst whatsapping his girlfriend.

This from Time:

 This was the 14th accident in six years and about 1.9 million miles of testing, according to the company.Google has said that its cars have not caused any of the collisions — though in 2011 an employee who took a car to run an errand rear-ended another vehicle while the Google car was out of self-driving mode.

In 11 of the 14, Google said its car was rear-ended.

My word that’s a lot of rear-ending. If I were a total cynic I’d think maybe the Google overlords are hiring people to deliberately rear-end their prototypes, in a bit to prove that machines really are better than humans. You might say this conspiracy theory is supported by the following blog post from the Head of Google’s self-driving car program, Chris Urmson:

The clear theme is human error and inattention. We’ll take all this as a signal that we’re starting to compare favorably with human drivers.”

Hmm. Make of that what you will.

It’s no KITT, but I’d take a spin in this bad boy…

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[source: Time]