General Motors' self-driving car violated a traffic rule - and was given a ticket

Various technology as well as conventional automobile manufacturers are developing autonomous vehicles or driverless cars. (Image: Reuters)

March was a rough month for self-driving cars.  While Uber’s autonomous car killed one person in Arizona while on testing, Tesla’s autopilot drive was engaged in a fatal crash in California.

The month ended with an autonomous Chevy Bolt by GM's autonomous cars division, Cruise, being slapped with a traffic ticket for not yielding to a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

A traffic police officer pulled over the car for not allowing a pedestrian to cross over in San Francisco, though the company asserted that no wrongdoing had happened.

As per a report in CBS, Cruise said that the data collected by the Bolt while it was in autonomous driving mode suggests that pedestrian was 10.8 feet away from the car while it passed through the intersection.

“Safety is our priority in testing our self-driving vehicles," Cruise said in a statement. "California law requires the vehicle to yield the right of way to pedestrians, allowing them to proceed undisturbed and unhurried without fear of interference of their safe passage through an intersection. Our data indicates that’s what happened here.”

A witness who was present there said that there was another car stopped alongside and he looked a little befuddled. The cop was just writing a regular ticket like they always do, he added.

The ticket was, though served to a driver sitting behind the wheels, but it raises an important question. In such scenarios, who should be held responsible, the driver sitting behind the wheel who did not take control of the car or the company who built and runs the technology? Such incidents also raise questions about the reliability of the futuristic technology.