Statistically, if you drive a lot you naturally increase the odds that you’ll be in a car accident; it’s just one of those law of averages that you can’t avoid. Even the driverless cars are involved in accidents sometimes (when humans are involved).
Google Street View cars are on the road a lot. They’ve put so many miles on the road that those little trike-equipped cars have accumulated 5,000,000 unique miles since they took to the roads to collect images for Google Street View. Given that distance would turn the odometer over several, several times, it shouldn’t be that surprising to find the Google Street View cars in the occasional bang-up.
While this has likely happened before, one of these accidents was actually witnessed by somebody who had the quick reaction to grab a picture. The image was shared by reddit user grangerm, which you see at the top of this article. Here’s the full image, complete with on-the-scene police officer.
That’s a bit more than a fender bender, really. The whole front end of the car got crunched up accordion-style, and given there’s not any damage to the sides of the car, you could probably make a fair bet that the Street View car rear-ended somebody (note: don’t text while driving!). Also, the impact seems to have knocked back that camera mount on the car, which, if I had to guess, is probably worth at least around the same amount as the car. Not a good day at the office for that Googler.
Utilizing my dazzling ability to do a Google Image Search for various state license plates to find one that matches the front plate of the cop car, it appears that this accident happened in Connecticut. After a little trial and error search on Google Maps using the clues of the street signs in the background, there’s a good chance that this accident happened in the swell city of Bristol, CT, at the intersection of Brook Street and Farmington Avenue, as you can see in the map below:
The map for that intersection of Bristol was last updated in 2009, which would make sense that the Google Street View car would be there since the city is probably due for an update. I guess one good thing for that Googler driving the car is that you know the whole accident was probably documents. Then again, if it’s the Googler’s fault, that could be bad news for job security.
[Via reddit.]