Google to Report Crashes of Driverless Cars

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 6, 8:15AM EDT

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Driverless cars can cause nausea in some, and boredom in other cases, but the main anxiety is whether, without a driver, they can really be safe. Based on some reports, they are not always. Now Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has released accident data about its “robot car,” and some of the results are not encouraging.

According to Consumer Watchdog:

Google today said it would issue regular reports offering some details of crashes involving its driverless cars. The public interest group said more details are still needed.

Presumably no one has been seriously injured, and Google will not release the car until it is deemed absolutely safe. But Consumer Watchdog is not satisfied with that and wants a regular accounting:

Google released its first of what it said would be monthly reports on a website dedicated to the driverless car project. Included in the report is a synopsis written by Google of the twelve accidents since it began testing the robot cars in 2009.

Also:

“We now know a few more details of what happened,” said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project director. “The problem is that it’s Google’s version and they want us to take their word for it.”

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For the time being, the organization appears to be satisfied that it only needs information from Google, which is odd. Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) claims it has an early and only partial version of a car that can drive itself. Volvo has started experiments. BMW has begun to do advanced testing. Ford Motor Co.’s (NYSE: F) president forecast his company will have a driverless car within five years. No organization has agitated in public to get more information for the tests of all these experiments.

Google’s driverless car has gotten the most media coverage, more than all these other efforts. It has drawn scrutiny because of that visibility.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.