> Regardless, Google kick-started a lot of other car makers to start developing self-driving cars or made it OK for other car makers to be more public about their efforts.
Exactly! This part of Google's legacy is severely under appreciated. People were rolling their eyes when Google originally presented their plan. Amazing how quickly it went from science fiction to reality.
I have the feeling Google never had a real plan behind this research project. Tesla's plan is clear. Uber's plan is clear. What is / was Google's plan?
Why can't it be the similar to the Uber or Tesla plan? Just because Alphabet make the bulk of their revenue from sticking ads in front of eyeballs doesn't mean that's how they have to continue making money.
Prevent people from being required to watch the traffic, thus giving them more time to use their phone/tablet, thus show them more ads.
But actually I believe the thing that started the project was more like "let's try to do it" just the same way they started their search engine ... for the first years they didn't have a business plan there either.
I learned about that "science fiction" in 1996 when I was an intern at back then called DASA (Daimler Aerospace), before the merger with Chrysler.
They worked on that science fiction already back then. They developed the basics for the radar back then. Without those developments and vision we had no commodity radar sensor available today.
I'm actually stunned. Google's initial announcement was 2012, around the same time as the Oculus Kickstarter. Tesla have stated they expect to enable full automation within a year.
So potentially we've gone from 0 to retail fully-automated vehicles in the same time it's taken to get VR headsets into mainstream usage. If you'd asked me to predict the timescales for these two developments I would have added a decade on to the former.
Exactly! This part of Google's legacy is severely under appreciated. People were rolling their eyes when Google originally presented their plan. Amazing how quickly it went from science fiction to reality.