Street View Smashup

Car accidents happen, and the more time you spend on the road, the more likely it is that you’ll be involved in one. If driving around is your full-time job, odds are that you will face a few collisions. Such is the case for the Google Street View Maps cars. The compact cars drive around cities with cameras affixed to the roof to capture images of each area they pass. Web Pro News reports that the Google cars have logged over five million unique miles on their quest to help you figure out where you’re going…or to creep people using their mailing address. The Google cars aren’t the only ones equipped with cameras: when they get into fender-benders, there are plenty of witnesses to snap photos of the results.

Carscoop reported the most recent, and likely most serious Google car crash on August 3. While no details have been released, it is reported that the accident happened in northern India. An Opel Astra emblazoned with the Google logo and sporting a rooftop camera left the road, fell down a rocky hill, and ended up in a ravine (as reported by Jalopnik, though the accompanying video shows dusty earth at the bottom of the hill, no water features). The video posted on Jalopnik shows the car in its resting place with one man being a mature adult and throwing rocks at the abandoned vehicle (maybe he’s a fan of MapQuest?) Tourists seem to have come across the car, as Carscoop notes that the man behind the camera in the video has a North American accent, and one man’s Flickr account shows him posing with the wreckage as if it was a road stop tourist attraction. You can see Pit Kellers posing in front of the wreck here or the video here.

Most of the Google car accidents have little information posted about them; there are only photos of the aftermath posted online. Drew Bowling of Web Pro News decided to take a photo of a Google car with a front end that was “crunched-up accordion-style” and find out where it happened using Google image searches and Google maps. He found that it most likely occurred in Bristol, Connecticut, at the intersection of Brook Street and Farmington Avenue. This accident was a bit more serious than a fender-bender; even the camera on top of the car seemed to be knocked over. Bowling estimates that the camera probably costs as much as the car, which could make this one expensive rear-ending.

One photo posted on Gizmodo and Droid Life showed a Google car with a smushed-in front end sitting in a parking lot. It was beside another Google car, one without the fancy camera on top, presumably about to have the damaged car’s camera transferred over. See it here.

One Droid Life reader spotted a Google car with a bit of front bumper damage in Virginia last June. Since the damage was on the front, it is assumed that the Google car rear-ended another, but there are no details released about it. If you want to take a look at the pretty standard fender-bender bumper damage, it can be seen here.

Oddly enough, all of the accidents showed damage to the front of the Google cars, suggesting that the Google driver rear-ended other cars in most of the cases. Because the other cars weren’t emblazoned with company logos, no one thought to take photos of their damage, so it is hard to speculate.