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Comment by mjfern | Hacker News Reader

The key question is why would Google produce this technology and enter the autonomous driving market?

I think one of the key issues for Google, from a corporate strategy standpoint, is "freeing up people's time." Driving is one of last places where we spend significant time awake without being able to use the Internet and hence any of Google's services (except if you use a smartphone, which is now illegal in some states, and in any event isn't an ideal place to be clicking on ads). There is a safety issue here as well. Although using a smartphone while driving is illegal in some states, people are driving while using their smartphones with increasing frequency. We need our Internet "fix."

I am sure this driving technology also taps into several of Google's key capabilities: e.g., programming expertise, its voice recognition technologies, search, and its mapping software (Google Maps and Navigation).

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Dr. Thrun is known as a passionate promoter of the potential to use robotic vehicles to make highways safer and lower the nation’s energy costs. It is a commitment shared by Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, according to several people familiar with the project.

It sounds like this may be as much an idealistic pet project as it is any kind of corporate strategy.

Larry's idealistic pet projects _are_ corporate strategy. That's why Google dominates - they are unpredictable and creative.

Crazy stuff Google did:

* mapped all the world's roads using cameras and a mechanical turk, destroying billions in market cap for map data providers

* Android, groundbreaking in both technology and pushing the envelope on patent law

* launched a satellite

* deep tendrils of fiber optics and community oriented wi-fi projects to connect the world

It doesn't surprise me at all Google is building autonomous cars. Search and adwords are not even the most intriguing things to me about Google these days.

Imagine a mad scientist who has $12,000,000,000. That is Google's strategy... also lots of testing.

Small correction: Google didn't "map all the world's roads using cameras and a mechanical turk, destroying billions in market cap for map data providers." That is more than a stretch. They mapped SOME of the roads in the US, augmenting existing TIGER data from the US government, and used it in place of TeleAtlas. The "new" data is pretty bad, so I use Bing for directions because of it. They still rely on TeleAtlas (one of the map data providers they "destroyed") for almost every other country.

That's probably what Google Translate and speech recognition and text-to-speech probably all sounded like ten years ago. But now all of these are able to work together to make a universal translator, turning speech in one language into speech of another language. Pretty fking cool, I'd say!

A company like Google can turn an idealistic pet project into something truly game-changing with consistent time and resources.

I don't know Sebastian that well, but I believe his motivations are largely idealistic. At least, that's the pitch he and his group used to make to prospective members - that solving the autonomous driving problem could save tens of thousands of lives a year.

Hey, less dying and making money!

Can't beat that.

Google currently hires people to drive their streetview cars. They could save a significant amount by automating that collection process. Beyond not having to pay drivers, you also don't have to have vehicles designed to keep their occupants safe, which could be significantly cheaper to produce, operate, and maintain.

And even though it's not a core part of their business today, the first company that can offer a viable automated trucking platform is going to be strongly positioned in a multi-trillion dollar industry.

People criticize Google for being "just an ad company". Branching out with tech like this would put an end to that pretty quickly, wouldn't it?

Sure, as soon as they can make money doing it. AFAIK their income from sources other than AdWords is negligible in comparison to their AdWords income.

It's the other way around too, at least for the first trips.

A human-driven Google Street View car would not only retrieve mapping data, photographs for the Street View and cellphone tower and wifi signatures for positioning; it would also serve to annotate the roads for easier navigation by autonomous vehicles.

If Google paid me to sit at home, I'd have a lot more free time than if my car drove itself.

I assume this is sarcasm, but perhaps not. If Google is developing this automobile technology, perhaps it should enter and promote telecommuting technologies to reduce the amount of time that people are in their cars?

They're already trying with at least Google Docs and Google Voice in Gmail.

Google is good at hard computer-science problems, which this is. It also has an obvious market application. Even if they don't market this themselves, it'd be easy to spin it off or sell it for lots of money.

I think it's more likely that someone high enough up though it was "cool", decided how "cool" they thought it was (1M? 10M? 50M?) and then approved the project.

Yes, his name is Larry.

One possible reason is what you just pointed out: If you have a 20 minute commute and you could trust your robotic driver to take care of it, that is 20 minutes you could be on your smart phone interacting with google advertising.

(personally I think the other comments about google doing it mostly because it is a hard, cool, worthwhile challenge are most on the money though)

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