Google Self-Driving Car Project's first vehicle prototype

A lot of people are bashing the car&#x27;s appearance, but I think people forget that putting the first driverless cars on the road is as much a PR challenge as it is a technological challenge. Truly autonomous driverless cars is a huge shift in the way we have operated for almost 100 years. There will be a lot of caution and resistance from political groups, concerned citizens, entrenched interests, etc. The car that they put forward first needs to be non-threatening, safe, and easy to adopt.<p>Given Google&#x27;s stake in Uber the car will be part of a fleet that can be summoned by a mobile app, not some product you go out and buy. Because there will be no dealerships and individual owners, they don&#x27;t care about attracting buyers for the vehicle - it doesn&#x27;t need a cool factor. What it needs is to be non-threatening and safe so you will feel comfortable getting in one and going for a ride.<p>Additionally, the first car on the roads will just be making in town trips and will be limited to 25mph - no highways or major arterials. This means it makes more sense for the car to be compact, light, and similar to a Smart Car, than a Camry or SUB.

My initial reaction was dismay that Google seemingly didn&#x27;t consult any decent auto designers on this. But then I wonder if that&#x27;s actually fine.<p>My kids will likely be baffled by the idea that we attached so much of our own identity to our cars. The financial investment in cars to make a statement about ourselves (over and above getting us from A to B) is immensely irrational.<p>With self driving cars ownership will likely disappear, and be replaced with time sharing. At that point the connection between our view of ourselves, and the car we ride in disappears.<p>I&#x27;m not sure that completely excuses the lack of modern car aesthetic here, but it could go some way to explaining it.

Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal got to have a ride in one and shared his thoughts here: <a href="http://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theoatmeal.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;google_self_driving_car</a>

Lots of people are point at this being Uber&#x27;s future &quot;auto-car&quot;. Here&#x27;s an alternative idea:<p>- You can buy this car. It costs $100,000. But that&#x27;s okay.<p>- When you aren&#x27;t actively using it, you tell it to go &quot;Uber mode&quot; and pick up and drive people around as part of the &quot;Uber Network of Cars&quot;<p>- You split the fee with Uber&#x2F;Lyft&#x2F;whoever. They get 30%, you get 70%.<p>If the average ride pays you $7, over 5 years that&#x27;s like 8 rides your car has to &quot;sell&quot; per day to be effectively &quot;free&quot; to you (except for financing, insurance, etc.).<p>- At the end of the workday, Google Now summons your car to pick you up in front of your office and whisk you home.<p>- After dropping you off at home, your car goes back onto Uber mode and does night-time service (if you opt-in).<p>You could probably pay your car off much earlier than 5 years with more rides&#x2F;higher average ride fare, after which your car is making you money. Clever people will use this extra to finance more cars to run small fleets and effectively live without working.

The way Google seems to be approaching self-driving cars is the right one in my opinion. Self-driving cars will be on-demand, booked through something like Uber and will not be owned by the end-user.<p>I feel that the other car companies working on self-driving car technology for consumers are wasting their time. The main reason I enjoy owning a nice car is that I like driving it. If I wasn&#x27;t in control of driving my car, what would be the point? Vanity of course has to be considered but in the future, I see self-driving cars which we don&#x27;t own will the the status quo in cities, and owning a manual operating a car will be either a novelty or something for people outside of major city hubs.

Given that as far as I know, roads must be extensively mapped in advance of a self-driving car going on them, there is a nice bonus of doing self-driving cars exclusively through Uber at first. Uber can know the exact route the passenger wants to take in advance, and only send cars to passengers whose routes are already mapped. Furthermore, they can choose to only send them out when the conditions are good (no snow, etc. assuming conditions are still a problem when these go into fuller production). A nice way to roll the cars out incrementally without some of the problems they might otherwise have...

One of the aspects of this that I&#x27;ve been getting concerned about is the invasion of privacy that they will pose, especially if it&#x27;s one or a handful of companies owning an operating the autonomous vehicles.<p>It&#x27;s true that if you carry a cell phone you already carry a personal tracking device and offer this information up freely to your cellular provider, but I&#x27;m interested in reducing instead of increasing the amount of information I&#x27;m leaking in that way.<p>What kind of information will these cars track? They&#x27;ll have to track who rides in them for accountability purposes, which I already find troubling. Your average cabby isn&#x27;t going to be compiling a profile about you based on where you catch rides to. Who has access to the information such as who rides in which cars? Is this available via an open API? I&#x27;m already peeved at companies like FitBit which hold my data ransom, is this going to be another of those situations?<p>There&#x27;s a lot of privacy questions that I feel aren&#x27;t being adequately addressed, but I still look forward to the possibilities this will bring. The privacy questions are answerable and any problems should be correctable.

To those that get hung up on the design: remember that this car is limited to 25 mph for regulatory reasons. Having a design that is closer to a bumper car than a model S seems fitting with that in mind.

A lot of people are bashing its appearance. I think it looks cute. So, to each his own on the regard. But seriously guys, this is happening a lot sooner than I thought and I really could not be any more excited to have these on the road.

Reminds me of the Cozy Coupe [1] I had as a child. Perhaps that&#x27;s not by accident. The fear is that these machines will be unsafe, either to their passengers or to other cards on the road. Making it cute my reduce the perceived threat level.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.littletikes.com/content/ebiz/shop/invt/612060/612060_cozy-coupe-30th-anniversary-edition_xalt5.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.littletikes.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;ebiz&#x2F;shop&#x2F;invt&#x2F;612060&#x2F;612...</a>

They&#x27;ve got to make more progress on the sensors. They still have that overpriced Velodyne HDL-64E scanner (about $100K) on top of the prototype. The new vehicle has a slightly smaller device on top, probably the HDL-32E. Google doesn&#x27;t seem to be making progress on flash LIDAR or millimeter microwave radar, which are going to be needed for reasonable-cost production vehicles.<p>CMU&#x2F;Cadillac have a self-driving car. They have a number of long videos taken with a back-seat camera.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXhvQeArwWM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uXhvQeArwWM</a><p>It&#x27;s good enough that it&#x27;s been driven around downtown Washington. It doesn&#x27;t seem to sense turn signals or infer much intent from other-driver behavior. The driver has his hand on the auto&#x2F;manual switch at all times; clearly there&#x27;s not much confidence in this thing yet.

Google has had much more PR about it&#x27;s revolutionary tech and that has a LOT going for it. When tesla comes out with their self driving car, if it looks 100x better than this prototype, I still might pick Google. Better aesthetics with comparable functionality will win the majority of time in my book (think Android devices vs Apple devices), however when it comes times to putting my life on the line, I will go with something I feel is safer 100% of the time regardless of how it looks. And like always, Google will dominate with it&#x27;s superior functionality (backed by their PR over the last couple of years) over any tesla any day.

<a href="http://assets.blog.hemmings.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/totalrecallbooniebug_03_resized.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.blog.hemmings.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2008&#x2F;06&#x2F;t...</a><p>Where can I take you sir?

I thought this was quite a good commentary on it: <a href="http://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theoatmeal.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;google_self_driving_car</a>

I wonder if these things could be used in potentially &#x27;easier&#x27; niches like long-haul trucking: you&#x27;d create a loading&#x2F;unloading port near the freeway, and send the truck to another port across the country.<p>Naturally, I don&#x27;t know anything about trucking, and you&#x27;d want to be really sure something so big and bulky is safe, but the idea would be, rather than &quot;do everything a car does all at once&quot; to do something relatively simple.

From an economic standpoint, I would be interested to see how many OTC parts this system. That is, does it need a $1000 lidar or would it get a similar performance with a cheap $100 sensor? From a technical point of view, 25mph is very limiting IMO. You probably do not need a very sophisticated controller to navigate at 25. If you reach speeds of 60-70MPH with varying road curvatures, the controller design gets trickier.

Cute, adorable, non-threatening... could have been achieved and still looked.. better, methinks.

I don&#x27;t have a firm enough understanding of how the LIDAR and laser&#x27;s work in these vehicles, but it occurs to me that it might be possible for a malicious actor to confuse the cars and cause accidents. That&#x27;s concerning.

Nobody who has used Adwords believes Google will ever make a self driving car.

What is the purpose of Google here, to develop a platform that car manufacturers want to integrate or producing driverless cars under Google brand?

i guess it has a strong appeal to the hardcore android crowd. people that get excited about utility, but have no sense at all for style. not a bad thing, mind you, but it is already obvious that it will take a company that gets style, like Tesla and yes, Apple, to make this appealing to people on the other side of the spectrum. people who cannot unsee ugliness, assymetry and disproportion.<p>personnally i just hope roads stay open for motorcycles in the future. self-driven transportation can be massive fun.

What&#x27;s with the side-view mirrors?

What, exactly, are the mirrors for?

Edit: Google staff and fanbois have far too much time to downvote, but less time to articulate why it seems!<p>I tried to use Google&#x27;s driverless car, but everytime I asked it to search for rival services, it kept driving me to their search and adsales offices. Was a bit weird. Like they told the car to prefer their services first! My eurotrash friends promised to investigate though, so that&#x27;s nice.

Unfortunately, these things just don&#x27;t have a cool factor. Here&#x27;s to hoping Tesla moves forward much more quickly (and regular car manufacturers as well.)<p>It&#x27;s something Google probably just doesn&#x27;t &quot;get&quot; - but a lot of people&#x27;s identities are tied to their cars. It&#x27;s why we have colors, shapes, brands, options.<p>This car may be &quot;perfect&quot; algorithmically, but it doesn&#x27;t mean it stirs the soul.

don&#x27;t worry guys, its only a matter of time until Uber adds another service called UberGrandma&#x2F;pa and starts targeting senior citizens with this car. (Google Ventures has a stake in Uber)

This thing looks like a clown car. Perfect for those who think Glass is the height of fashion.

It looks crap.<p>Google, please don&#x27;t release that.<p>(OR: Google, I will pay more not to ride in that.)