Google patents ad-powered taxi service that would offer free rides to shoppers
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
You walk up to a driver and tell him where you want to go. He quotes you a ludicrously low price. You hop in. He drives you several miles out of your way and stops you in front of a Priceless Gem Broker's shop, and refuses to budge until you go up and at least take a look around.
This is common enough that you need to actually specify "No Shopping" when you hail a tuk tuk so that you can get a price that involves driving directly from here to your destination.
The value of an ad is, say, ten cents per thousand. You can upgrade the price because you have (a) a captive audience for ten minutes which has (b) already decided to visit your location, but you need to counter that with (c) has already decided to visit your location, so you aren't getting an additional expected profit from that. So, let's say a dollar per 1000. In ten minutes you can show no more than a hundred ads (and showing so many will overwhelm the viewer and desensitize them), so the expected ad value is 10 cents.
Even if the expected ad value is a dollar, that just about pays for a bus ride, not a taxi ride.
OK, so it's a self-driving taxi, no labor costs, electric is cheaper than gas, and you own it so you don't need to make an additional profit, just cover the costs. You still can't do it. Maybe a self-driving bus with a route from a public transport hub to your inexplicably inaccessible location...
Not everything is about making profit and money directly. Google have repeatedly showed that they don't go after projects thinking about generating profit first. And honestly if I had to bet on any single company trying to push the envelope in making self-driving cars in our daily life (not merely as a concept that is possible), Google is it. If Google doesn't go for it, no one else will do it anytime soon, or even in our lifetime IMO.
Imagine. The taxi would probably take a sponsored route through commercial hubs. Show you a good view of a hotel perhaps so that you take a room there. The radio would play ads and the windows would be transparent panels with overlaid ads.
This whole focus of Google on ads is sickening.
I think we are onto something.
:-)
(could not resist)
Edit: in all seriousness I looked quite hard for ride-shares to help me with a killer commute. I even looked at the price of a daily taxi doing 100 miles pday (ha ha ha) and one a different contract was amazed to find a large 16 wheeler coach that passed by my house (in commuter-land) and dropped off in Central London on the same street as the clients office. (Notably with the coffee shop between the drop off point and the office, saving everyone some time.)
I'm not sure offering a free ride to a centrally located business would make financial sense.
Is it important to offer a free return journey?
Of note, in the UK, some out of town supermarkets offer a free bus service to them. However the key bit is that there is usually nothing else near them to make it worth taking the bus unless you actually want to go to that supermarket.
I would also like to point out that every ride they give, and every offer a customer uses, they are getting that much more data to create better behavior guesses which will help show the ads that would be used instead of abused. I also could see this being offered only after you have put in a destination (and thus also your credit card which means you actually need transportation) and if you are going to an area with a ton of restaurants at 5pm, it might instead suggest a restaurant (not near the destination). this couldn't be abused as easy.
I honestly don't see a way this couldn't be profitable in the long run knowing how Google uses all of their behavior data. (this all really depends on the car being self-driven)
The service seemed to very popular and heavily used, but it would be hard to say if those people weren't already going to the store and were just taking advantage of the free transport.