"In one scenario, it appears, a driver is looking for a parking space and drives over a giant QR code on a street or in a parking garage. The QR code might either have exact directions to a specific parking spot, or it might link to a parking garage database of which parking slots are open."<p>This strikes me as ripe for abuse.
I suspect this is simply one of many self-driving car patents Google will file, but it's fun to speculate:<p>Technological hurdles aside, the catch-22 situation is that without much evidence the technology works there will never be public acceptance and legislation for it to be used on the roads. Perhaps Google plan to initially market the system as some sort of beefed-up parking assist - one where you leave your car at the entrance to a car park and collect it from there later. I'm not lawyer, but car parks != public roads, so different laws should apply.<p>Obviously, nobody would pay loads of extra cash just for that feature, but maybe Google would be willing to subsidise it in the hope that it gets them over the public-acceptance hurdle as people would start getting used to cars driving themselves around without incident and start to trust the technology. It would also build up thousands of hours of evidence of the safety of the system, which the legislators are going to want to see before they okay it for general driving.<p>Personally, I can't wait until self-driving cars are a reality. It's going to revolutionise transport. :)
This was discussed a few days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3355876" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3355876</a>
Can I tell the robot car to run over a pedestrian if he has an ak-47 pointed at me and he is on the curb? A self defense situational awareness algorithm that understands kill or be killed?