ON THE LITE SIDE - Better Driver? Robot or People?

"Google Engineer Worse Driver Than Google's Robot Car, Apparently" by Andrew Dalton, SFist.com 8/5/2011

Today in things that Google computers are better at than you, simple human: Driving. An incident involving a Google driverless Prius was originally reported by Jalopnik this morning as the first traffic accident for Google's fleet of robot cars. Which could have been terrible PR for the Google autonomous vehicle program that's been quietly logging hundreds of thousands of miles on the streets of California and Nevada. As it turns out, the incident in which a gPrius rear-ended another Prius near the company's headquarters in Mountain View occurred while the vehicle was in manual mode. So, the robot car wasn't trying to mate with another hybrid vehicle, then?

In a statement to Business Insider, a Google spokesperson said, "Safety is our top priority. One of our goals is to prevent fender-benders like this one, which occurred while a person was manually driving the car." Of course, Google could just be trying to cover their ass here by pinning their blame on the poor engineer who was in the driver's seat at the time. But if human error is to blame then we suppose we've finally arrived at the new and exciting future where human drivers are obsolete. Now if you'll excuse us, we'll be napping on cruise control.