When I first heard about Google’s self-driving cars I was excited. Google weren’t the first to experiment with this kind of thing, and technology is evolving, but deep down I always knew it would be hard to trump KITT from Knight Rider, or the DeLorean DMC-12 from Back to the Future. Prius on Prius car love after the jump.

What makes this accident unique is that there was “nobody” behind the wheel when it occurred. Well, sort of.

Google is claiming that the car had been flipped into “manual” mode and was actually being driven by its standby human pilot at the time.

A spokesperson told Business Insider pretty shortly after word got out that:

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.

The self-driving cars use a combination of video cameras, radar sensors, and laser range finders to see other cars and rely on Google Maps and Google Earth to find their way.

PCWorld has gone and said what some of us are already thinking, though:

Naturally if an accident were to occur while the car was in auto-pilot, it could cause some serious problems for Google’s project. Let’s go out on a limb and hypothesize that the car was to blame, even partially. It would be much easier for Google to have an employee take the fall rather than the software. Not to mention that it would probably next to impossible to prove otherwise.

Interesting train of thought that.

Here’s where it gets really fascinating. A witness got hold of NBC and told them this:

Google’s Prius struck another Prius, which then struck [my] Honda Accord that [my] brother was driving. [My] Accord then struck another Honda Accord, and the second Accord hit a separate, non-Google-owned Prius.

So, that’s three Priuses and two Accords in total.

Another Google spokesperson quickly jumped on the defensive after that claiming he didn’t know how many cars were actually involved.

There’s nothing like a good conspiracy theory every now and then, hey gang.

[Sources: PCWorld, NBC]