~3M Km of roads (urban and rural)
- Assuming avg speed of 30KM/hr, that is 100,000 man hours of work just to record the data.
- Double the estimate to accomodate 2 person teams (driver and technician). 200,000 man hours.
- 50 Rs/hour on average would probably be decent pay for a driver/technician that's semiskilled. (Rs 12000/month with an 8 hour workday). 50 Rs > $1. So, let's say $1 per hour.
- Total cost for recording ALL urban and rural roads excluding state and national highways: $200,000
That's probably around the annual salary of one Sr. engineer at Google in Mountain View.
They could afford to do it multiple times a year.
This doesn't consider the cost of processing this data but Google being Google, I am sure they have automated tools that convert these recordings into Street view quite cheaply. Computing power is their cheapest resource.
Improving the estimate:
- There's also the cost of equipment. It would take 1000 teams 12 working days (~100 hours) each to record data. If you have a little more than a month you only need 333 teams, and so on. Also I bet they are only doing cities first, so they could probably do with 100 teams at a time. Let's say the equipment is USD $2K per team. That's $200,000 in equipment. I am guessing they can do it for much cheaper since they are likely reusing equipment across countries.
- There's the cost of renting the auto-rickshaws. Looks like the 'retail' rate for an auto-rickshaw trip is about Rs 12 per KM (all inclusive) for short trips. Since we are paying the driver separately, 12 per KM may be excessive for the rickshaw + gas, but let's use it anyway. That's Another Rs 12,00,000 = ~$24,000
Updated total cost: $424,000
Imagine if you were a startup in India circa 2007 when street view launched in the U.S. If you had the technical chops to build tools for street view, it would have been a no-brainer to invest this kind of money and get the data. Google, Microsoft or Yahoo would have happily paid 10x to acquire the startup.
Google has their work cut out for them.
It turns out that a lot of houses don't really have addresses. A lot of alleys don't have street names. A lot of buildings just get built, and there's not always an official address for them. So it would definitely be interesting, yes.