Google Inc has issued the first of its monthly reports on incidents with its driverless cars after the second accident involving one of its vehicles occurred within a week.

Following initial refusal at a shareholder's meeting last week by the company's co-founder, Sergey Brin, to publish incident data, Google said on Friday it will now do so on a dedicated website.

The first report shows an autonomous vehicle stopping to avoid two cyclists crossing a junction, one of whom was apparently salmoning (riding against the flow of traffic) towards the car. Since May 2010 Google Inc reports 11 collisions with its cars, four of which happened in 2015, and none of which were blamed on the autonomous car. 

While Brin wants Google cars, which could be tested on city streets from this summer, to "beat human drivers", believed to be responsible for 90% of crashes, the company has attracted criticism for a lack of transparency by withholding incident data during years of testing the vehicles on the streets of Mountain View, California.

Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project director, John Simpson, who confronted Brin at the shareholder's meeting last week, told USA Today:

"Google is dribbling out bits information in the hope to silence legitimate calls for full transparency,"

"They are testing on public roads and the public has a right to know exactly what happened when something goes wrong."

Simpson has previously said Google Inc eventually wants to do away with the steering wheel and pedals altogether, so a person cannot take over if the vehicle runs out of control, making it even more important crash data is made public.

There were 11 minor accidents involving Google's autonomous cars in six years and 1.7m miles of the project's testing in Mountain View, 1m of which were during self-drive mode. One of Google's autonomous vehicles was apparently rear-ended at a red traffic light on Thursday while last weekend another unit was hit by a vehicle.

The first report also shows situations of interest, including one at night (pictured above) where the vehicle kept track of two cyclists, one of whom moved into a left turn lane before the cyclist "veered back onto our path to continue straight across the intersection", according to the report.  

The report goes on: "At the same time, the cyclist on the right entered the intersection, traveling against the flow of traffic. That cyclist then took a sudden left turn, coming directly at us in our lane.

"Our car was able to predict that cyclist’s path of travel (turquoise line with circles) so we stopped and yielded. This happened at night, when it would have been very difficult for a human driver to see what was unfolding."

Proponents of the designs argue their radars and sensors make the cars able to understand their surroundings better than human drivers, as well as having faster reaction times. The cars can honk horns and flash at distracted drivers, and tighten seatbelts and take evasive action if they sense a likely crash.

As well as data on crashes, examples of how the cars react to common traffic situations will be published. For now Google cars are still accompanied by a human driver.

The company said: "We've made a lot of progress with our self-driving technology over the past six years, and we're still learning,"