Since AP reported earlier today that Google's self-driving cars had been involved in three car crashes in California, Google has tried to take control of the story by releasing full details of 11 accidents involving its cars - but it says that humans, not the robots have been causing these collisions.

In a blog post published on Medium's Backchannel blog, the director of Google’s self-driving car project, Chris Urmson sought to explain the safety record of the cars.

He states: "Over the 6 years since we started the project, we’ve been involved in 11 minor accidents (light damage, no injuries) during those 1.7 million miles of autonomous and manual driving with our safety drivers behind the wheel, and not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident."

The piece argues that at any given moment there are thousands of human drivers on the road getting distracted by their phones or experiencing other attention lapses while Google's self-driving cars enjoy 360 degree vision and "100 percent attention out in all directions at all times."

He goes on to detail specific instances when Google's cars are hit or almost hit by distracted or impatient humans.

In the state of California where Google is carrying out its trials each company that puts self-driving cars on the road is required to pay a bond of $5m against the cars potentially causing damages to property or injuring people. 

Google has a fleet of more than 40 self-driving cars and the company has been testing this technology for over six years.