Doh, a deer: Google Map's mea culpa

HIT AND RUN: A Google Street View car's fatal enounter with a deer has been captured and loaded on to Google Maps.

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Google has 'fessed up to an accident involving one of its cars and a deer - an incident that was captured by the car's special camera and later included on the Street View feature on Google Maps.

Google removed the images from Street View earlier today after several blogs posted links to the incident on Google Maps but not before the images were captured and republished on the unaffiliated Street View Gallery site.

The images show a young deer running beside the Google car before it can been seen lying on its side. A third screen grab shows the deer lying on the side of the road in the distance as the car moves away.

The car was travelling in broad daylight down a narrow road in rural New York state when the accident happened.

Street View operations manager Wendy Wang, later posted an explanation cum apology on the official Google Maps blog.

"Gathering the imagery for Street View requires quite a bit of driving; as such, we take safety very seriously. Unfortunately, accidents do happen ..." she wrote.

"The driver was understandably upset, and promptly stopped to alert the local police and the Street View team at Google."

Although in the last of the sequence of images the deer looks for all the world like road kill, Wang said the driver reported that the creature was able to move and had left the vicinity by the time the police arrived.

She quoted estimates from the New York State Department of Transportation which reckoned that there are some 60,000-70,000 deer collisions a year in that state alone.

The photos were snapped by a camera mounted on the roof of the car - one of a number of specially kitted-out vehicles that Google dispatches to gather the imagery for Street View.

The images are taken by the special cameras which sit on elevated pedestal above the roof.

They are later "stitched" together to form a continuous street panorama that gives users of the free web service a 360-degree horizontal and 290-degree vertical view of a location from ground level.

- Reuters