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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

many major car manufacturers

Who?

All demos that I've seen from Mercedes Benz, BMW, Toyota, Volvo, etc. were generations behind google. The self-parking car seemed to be their most impressive feat so far.

Meanwhile Google Car is commuting in live city traffic, without anyone touching the wheel.

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http://www.cnet.com/news/a-ride-in-volvos-autonomous-car-how...

Google just has better advertising because that is Google's core business.

Car manufacturers are aiming for consumer budget, i.e. are planing to sell these technologies to customers in foreseeable future, while google is building self driving car no matter the costs and is reaching space program-like budget. So there's also that to consider.

Car manufacturers are aiming wrong because of their old business model. Google is aiming at a taxi service, where expensive car costs are less critical, but being first to market(by quite a few years), reliable, having a large network and a good brand mean much more.

Here's a Mercedes prototype driving in live traffic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5kJ_8JAp-w

I would put that on the same league as Google's.

I wouldn't be surprised to see the big car manufacturers put a self-driving car on the market before Google. For instance, the car in the video looks much more like an actual product than the Google car, with it's spinning radar on top.

Google's spent a lot of money in a lot of different areas, but I haven't been terribly impressed by their output. Google glasses seems to be a good example about how they can excite people before release and then stumble when the product actually comes out (though this is an issue with a lot of tech companies).

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