It appears the roads of California are about to get even more crowded with self-driving cars. The Wall Street Journal reports that Valeo (a tier-one supplier to the auto industry) and Wheego (an electric vehicle powertrain engineering company) have each been granted permits by the state’s DMV to begin testing a single autonomous vehicle on public roads. And over at electrek, there are some grainy spy shots of Google’s new fleet of self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans, the first fruits of Google’s partnership with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.
By being one of the first states in the nation to allow for the testing of autonomous vehicles on its roads, California has become quite the hotbed for self-driving car research. The addition of Wheego and Valeo now brings the total number of testing permits issued up to 17. At the end of the summer, Chinese tech firm Baidu gained permission to begin testing autonomous vehicles in the state as well.
Those tests appear to be going quite well as of late. As part of the conditions of being granted an autonomous vehicle testing permit, each company must report any accidents to the DMV along with a report of what happened. In the past two years, only 19 such incidents have occurred, the most recent happening at the beginning of September 2016 when a Google test vehicle was rear-ended by a human driver.
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