In a comment on his post, Milewski said that he had “talked to the driver” of the self-driving car. (Presumably, he meant the human sitting in the front seat.) He said that “apparently MVPD [Mountain View Police Department] doesn’t get NEVs [Neighborhood Electric Vehicles, a classification of vehicle that is limited to slower-moving roads] and pulled them over to ask why they were all going so slow.” Google confirmed the report with its own post on Google+. “Driving too slowly? Bet humans don’t get pulled over for that too often,” the company quipped. The 25 MPH limit has been imposed for safety reasons and so that they feel “friendly and approachable” while driving on public roads. However, in case of any unwanted incidents like the one above, they also have manual controls, so that the human inside the car can take over and drive if they need to. “Like this officer, people sometimes flag us down when they want to know more about our project,” Google said. “After 1.2 million miles of autonomous driving (that’s the human equivalent of 90 years of driving experience), we’re proud to say we’ve never been ticketed!” Google is currently testing the cars on the public roads in the Austin, Texas and in the city around its HQ.
