Read: The Founder of 4chan Is Going to Work for Google Now
UPDATE 3/9/16: Looks like AP has pulled the video off of YouTube. We’ll have a working embed up there as soon as possible. Sit tight.
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Google is working tirelessly to usher in a new world where you shove spoonfuls of cereal in your face from the driver’s seat while your car pilots itself around town, but we still aren’t quite there yet. Last Valentine’s Day, a driverless Google car sideswiped a Silicon Valley bus full of people, and video of the robot-bus collision is available now, thanks to the Associated Press.
The video, cobbled together from traffic footage and the bus’s surveillance camera, doesn’t exactly capture the greatest crash angle, but you can at least catch a glimpse of the white, driverless SUV scraping against the bus and the bus driver’s dumbfounded face as he pulls over to check out the damage.
According the Los Angeles Times, the self-driving car was preparing to make a right turn when it got a bit confused thanks to some sandbags surrounding a manhole. The robocar did what humans typically do when they see something unexpected in their path—it swerved out of the way, smashing into the crowded public bus.
This isn’t the first time a self-driving car has caused a stir on the road, but it is the first time Google has admitted that its car was at fault.
That said, Google’s official report on the accident had a decidedly “sorry-not-sorry” tone: “From now on, our cars will more deeply understand that buses (and other large vehicles) are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles,” Google wrote.”We hope to handle situations like this more gracefully in the future.”
