From MIT’s Technology Review:
Among other unsolved problems, Google has yet to drive in snow, and Urmson says safety concerns preclude testing during heavy rains. Nor has it tackled big, open parking lots or multilevel garages. The car’s video cameras detect the color of a traffic light; Urmson said his team is still working to prevent them from being blinded when the sun is directly behind a light. Despite progress handling road crews, “I could construct a construction zone that could befuddle the car,” Urmson says.
The deeper Google’s Self Driving Car team digs into the problems associated with driverless cars, the more they realize about the incredible complexity of the space. That said, I still think this tech is coming, albeit with an extremely slow rollout under extremely controlled conditions.
According to Wall street analyst,
only 5% of cars will be driverless by 2030.
and every car manufacturer has been working on
their own version.
Most of also have the DARPA challenge code
especially those universities and car manufacturer that
sponsored it.
And most of the patents will expire by 2030 so how
is Google going to profit from it.
The self-driving car project at Google is like many of their other bizarre projects. Half for publicity, half to distract the world from the fact that 97% of Google’s revenue comes from ads. It’s like there’s a huge corporate guilt from making money by spamming web pages with banner ads and by polluting their search results with pay-for-placement ads. And working on futuristic projects for the benefit of mankind is a way of assuaging that guilt.
On the other hand, Google simply doesn’t know how to develop relationships with other tech companies. They don’t partner well at all. They think they can do almost as well as the incumbents, but they don’t need to make a profit because of their massive ad revenue. So they invent their own technology, wade into various technology niches, and dump their stuff onto the market for free or at cost. No, it’s not as good as the incumbents’ technology. But yes, it’s cheaper, so people fall into the Google-cheap trap.
As dr.one says, there probably isn’t a single major automaker in the world that isn’t already working on self-driving cars. And I’m sure NASA could trickle down some of their flying car “highway in the sky” research to ground-based autonomous and semi-autonomous transportation.
Meanwhile, here’s Google racking up millions of miles on a few Priuses as a publicity stunt. Oops, but sorry, Larry and Sergey, Tesla isn’t for sale. It’s all for nothing.
Pot holes.
This brings to mind the humorous (but fake) exchange between “Bill Gates” implying cars aren’t being innovated fast enough, and a “GM press release” itemizing all the failures of software programming such as how often crashes were acceptable.
http://www.snopes.com/humor/jokes/autos.asp
Google profit from it by appearing to be “innovative”.
I suppose in one way it is innovations, however, when Apple delivers a product it is usually both honed and complete.
Google, like Samsung, are innovating by throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.
The patents are irrelevant really as it promotes the concept that Google are really creative, where in fact they are just throwing money around…
Dave, it’s already achieved its design goals in the form of its contribution to GOOGL’s stock price via perceived value of some day owning a big chunk of the auto industry. Doesn’t matter if it’s not finished or never gets finished.
There’s no guilt at Google. But there is dissociative denial.