In a blog posted Thursday, the head of Google's self-driving car program, Chris Urmson, wrote that his SUVs "are being hit surprisingly often" by distracted drivers, perhaps people looking at their phones. That's a big motivator for us." FILE - In this May 13, 2015, file photo, Google's self-driving Lexus car drives along street during a demonstration at Google campus in Mountain View, Calif. Google says that one of its self-driving cars... (Associated Press) 
 
 In the collision, a Lexus SUV that the tech giant outfitted with sensors and cameras was rear-ended in Google's home city of Mountain View, where more than 20 prototypes have been self-maneuvering through traffic. That was in fact the case for the July 1 crash, which was the result of Google's car stopping at an green-lit intersection - along with other motorists - because the traffic ahead was backed up. After we’d stopped, a car slammed into the back of us at 17 mph — and it hadn’t braked at all. This certainly seems like the driver was distracted and not watching the road ahead. Just weeks after reporting to the California Department of Motor Vehicles that its gadget-packed Lexus SUVs had been hit twice in the rear bumper while waiting at stop lights in Mountain View, Calif., Google reported Thursday that on July 1 a motorist smashed into its stationary autonomous vehicle at 17 mph, resulting in minor whiplash to passengers in both cars and causing the offending car's front bumper to fall off. Yet there are millions of fender benders every year that go unreported and uncounted — potentially as many as 55% of all crashes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. According to an accident report that Google filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles about the July 1 crash: 
 
 Google's SUV was going about 15 mph in self-driving mode behind two other cars as the group approached an intersection with a green light. (Our cars, with safety drivers aboard, are now self-driving about 10,000 miles per week, which is about what a typical American adult drives in a year.) Other drivers have hit us 14 times since the start of our project in 2009 (including 11 rear-enders), and not once has the self-driving car been the cause of the collision. "The clear theme is human error and inattention," Urmson wrote. "We'll take all this as a signal that we're starting to compare favorably with human drivers." Writes Urmson: "Our self-driving cars can pay attention to hundreds of objects at once, 360 degrees in all directions, and they never get tired, irritable or distracted. People, on the other hand, “drive as if the world is a television show viewed on TiVo that can be paused in real time — one can duck out for a moment, grab a beer from the fridge, and come back to right where they left off without missing a beat” — to quote Sheila Klauer of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute in Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do. That's certainly consistent with what we're seeing." In California, a person must be behind the wheel of a self-driving car being tested on public roads to take control in an emergency.
– It sounds as if Google is getting a bit fed up with the way distracted, flawed humans keep crashing into its self-driving cars. In the latest accident, which the AP reports is the first involving a Google car to cause human injury, a car rear-ended a stationary self-driving car at 17mph, causing minor whiplash to people in both vehicles. This is the 14th accident involving the self-driving cars, and Google says they have all been minor and all been the fault of the driver of the other vehicle. "We're seeing first-hand the true measure of how distraction is impacting driving," self-driving car project chief Chris Urmson tells USA Today. In the accidents, which include 11 rear-enders, "the clear theme is human error and inattention," Urmson writes in a Medium blog post. "We'll take all this as a signal that we're starting to compare favorably with human drivers." Unlike humans, he notes, Google's cars "can pay attention to hundreds of objects at once, 360 degrees in all directions, and they never get tired, irritable, or distracted." He tells the AP that Google is looking into ways to alert distracted drivers when a collision with a self-driving car is imminent, although they suspect self-honking cars won't go down too well with the public.