Google self-driving car pulled over by police in Los Altos for driving too slowly

A police officer in Los Altos, California, pulled over one of Google's autonomous test vehicles near the company's headquarters. The infraction was speed: Google caps the cars at 25mph, and the officer wanted to know why they were crawling.

Zandr Milewski photographed the stop and posted it to Facebook, passing along what the driver told him: "MVPD (Mountain View Police Department) doesn't get NEVs (Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles) and pulled them over to ask why they were all going so slow." Google explained the cap on Google+ as a friendliness measure, saying it wanted the cars to "feel friendly and approachable, rather than zooming scarily through neighbourhood streets," and noted that after 1.2 million autonomous miles, "the human equivalent of 90 years of driving experience," it had never been ticketed. It still hasn't. No citation was issued, though slow-driving fines exist: up to $1,000 in some US states, £100 in the UK, and 128 tickets handed out in Abu Dhabi.