Cody Rosenfield

The riskiest thing about self-driving vehicles may turn out to be human drivers.

Four of the nearly 50 self-driving cars undergoing tests on California roads since September, when the state began issuing permits to auto companies, have crashed.

But the cars, three owned by Google and one by Delphi, were in collisions caused by human error.

Driver inattention was behind the collisions involving the Google cars, said Katelin Jabbari, a spokeswoman for the tech giant, which is developing a fleet of autonomous vehicles.

Google wants to take over our highways the way it has taken over the information superhighway. Its driverless cars are a lot closer to road domination than many people think.

Back in 2012 Google announced that its robo rides had completed 300,000 miles of test driving without a single accident, making them safer than the average American driver (who is involved in an accident about every 165,000 miles).

Despite a protest of almost 200 residents, the Santa Monica city council unanimously passed an ordinance Tuesday that will prohibit residents from sharing their place when they're not present.

This tough legislation is a first, Airbnb spokesperson Alison Schumer, told KPCC prior to the meeting. 

"The unnecessarily restrictive proposal would prohibit hosts from sharing their home with guests while the host is out of town — a unique provision which has never before been proposed," Schumer wrote in an email. 

Four of the nearly 50 self-driving cars now rolling around California have gotten into accidents since September, when the state began issuing permits for companies to test them on public roads.

Two accidents happened while the cars were in control. In the other two a human was driving, a person familiar with the accident reports told The Associated Press. All four accidents involved speeds of less than 10 mph.

In both the UK and the US, policy makers are in the process of changing legislation to allow self-driving cars to be used on public roads commercially.

But while the cars are generally regarded as being safe, it has emerged that four autonomous cars have gotten into accidents on Californian roads since September.

Three were cars run by Google, and the fourth was an Audi car.