We know Google’s self-driving car is cautious (maybe too cautious), but how slow is too slow?

The company’s self-driving-car project was pulled over by police in Mountain View, California, because it was apparently traveling at 24mph (39 km/h) in a 35mph (56 km/h) zone.

 According to a blog post made by the Mountain View police department about the incident, the autonomous vehicle’s high safety standards queued up traffic behind it. When a police officer went to investigate the reason why motorists were slowing down, he realized that it was Google’s oddball creation obscuring the normal flow of traffic, so he pulled the car over and made contact with the operators learn more about the car’s reason of traveling so slow and to “educate the operators about impeding traffic”

Now, Google’s car can only be operated on roadways with speed limits at around (or under) 35mph (56 km/h), since the car is limited due to safety reasons at 25 mph (40 km/h); still, the technology company didn’t hesitate to come up with a (funny) statement regarding the event:

Driving too slowly? Bet humans don’t get pulled over for that too often. We’ve capped the speed of our prototype vehicles at 25mph for safety reasons. We want them to feel friendly and approachable, rather than zooming scarily through neighborhood streets.

Like this officer, people sometimes flag us down when they want to know more about our project. After 1.2 million miles of autonomous driving (that’s the human equivalent of 90 years of driving experience), we’re proud to say we’ve never been ticketed!

Via BBC, Twitter picture via Aleksandr Milewski