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Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions

forbes.com

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Re: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions

#81

Post by surrealize »

bcoates wrote: post #70
Cushman wrote: post #50

I've been saying this to anyone who will listen for years. I really believe this technology will touch everything . Real estate markets will shift dramatically as the average commute time halves or quarters. Transport costs will plummet, making every single physical object cheaper. Public transit will be dirt cheap, always punctual, and take you absolutely anywhere. Tens of thousands of people each year will escape d…

Driverless cars would be a fantastic improvement to society, but I think you might be underestimating how much people will compensate. Traffic rises to fill roads, and only a small part of public transport budgets are for drivers (it looks like around 10% for LA)

> only a small part of public transport budgets are for drivers (it looks like around 10% for LA)

Well, you also have to consider that bus systems are built around driver scarcity. What if buses were half as large, and run twice as often? They can't now, because that would double driver labor costs.

If buses were the size of vans, capital costs might even decrease due to having access to van-market economies of scale (the market for vans presumably being significantly larger than the market for buses).

Re: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions

#82

Post by megablast »

dmix wrote: post #21
OGinparadise wrote: post #16

Fasten Your Seatbelts: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions Amazing! He studied and compared all other driver-less cars to Google's and came to this conclusion. I know a writer getting paid for clicks wouldn't forget that virtually every major car company is working on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car#History

Xerox's GUI was worth trillions.

It is easy to throw out a statement like that, but hard to justify.

How big would computers be today without the GUI, with a different system.

Re: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions

#83

Post by h2s »

Holy shit. Forbes is an absolute cesspool of a website.

There are about three paragraphs of text, and then I have to pony up another ad impression by clicking through to the next page in order to keep reading. All the while, two enormous fixed nav bars follow my every move at both the top and the bottom of the page. Meanwhile a veritable flotilla of fixed-position "social icons" on the left beg me to help Forbes advertise their content. And to the right of the article? Adverts as far as the eye can see. Even within that center column, the content is occasionally interrupted with links to other unrelated content. And below the article text itself are a bunched of "Sponsored Content You Might Like" links doing their very best to look similar to "Related Stories".

What's going on here? Is this what it takes for Forbes to turn a profit?

Re: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions

#84

Post by thisiswei »

Cushman wrote: post #50

I've been saying this to anyone who will listen for years. I really believe this technology will touch everything . Real estate markets will shift dramatically as the average commute time halves or quarters. Transport costs will plummet, making every single physical object cheaper. Public transit will be dirt cheap, always punctual, and take you absolutely anywhere. Tens of thousands of people each year will escape d…

glad im learning cs373 (self-driving-car) by the the sebastian thrun

Re: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions

#85

Post by kamaal »

dmix wrote: post #21
OGinparadise wrote: post #16

Fasten Your Seatbelts: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions Amazing! He studied and compared all other driver-less cars to Google's and came to this conclusion. I know a writer getting paid for clicks wouldn't forget that virtually every major car company is working on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car#History

Xerox's GUI was worth trillions.

Just like how Xerox was unable to realize the value of what they had. Its very possible the car makers too, might think on the same line.

Sometimes you need a outsider to show you how powerful your own work can be.

Re: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions

#86

Post by gfodor »

defrost wrote: post #75
gfodor wrote: post #54

I'm going to disagree with other posters that Google is not going to own this market. It's hard to think of another company that is even close to being able to execute on this. It's the ultimate big data problem. The in-house experience of Google at running computing infrastructure is a must-have for this type of system to work.

Rio Tinto. Not for general public driving, of course, but for fleets of trucks and excavators that operate globally 24/7. At various sites they are already operating driverless equipment using tech developed in house. For what it's worth, oil & gas & mineral exploration work drove a large part of the civilian development of tools like Google Earth / Google Maps in the decades prior to the first public offerings by Go…

I still see it as orders of magnitudes off in complexity. You're talking about a system for autonomously controlling every motor vehicle in the U.S., or even the world -- that's effectively the end game. Google is among the handful of companies that has the computing infrastructure to have a "pulse" on the world at all times, and within those companies they are heads and shoulders above the rest in terms of being able to implement large scale, distributed information processing algorithms with low latency at that scale. It's a very rare, maybe completely unique cross section of capabilities. Google is better suited to solving this problem in many ways than any other problem they're currently solving.

The point is the capabilities I'm talking about have nothing to do with cars and everything to do with computing. Pointing to another company doing autonomous vehicles as a counterexample is kinda-sorta missing my point.

Re: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions

#87

Post by suhastech »

visarga wrote: post #71
suhastech wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree that the world is moving more toward virtual commuting. Somehow, I feel there is still no alterative to real world communication. Until that is fixed, this is still amazing. Self driving cars will have a metro train like experience with very good reach thanks to the existing infrastructure (roads).

I feel Skype + VNC form a good enough solution for many situations. I am working with my brother on a project like this and it is just as good as physically being at the same desk. The mouse and desktop apps seem almost as responsive as on a local computer. The sound is just as good as in person.

I agree. This situation works great for computer related work.

You probably can't build a robot or waltz with your partner on Skype.

Re: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions

#88

Post by rmc »

moocow01 wrote: post #4

The market is worth trillions... not Google's solution. One thing tech reporters seem to have failed at recognizing is that this research has been taking place at every major car company out there - many many others are legitimately in the race. Ultimately its the manufacturers that get to pull the trigger on how driverless cars will become driverless.

Sometimes a new company can come in and shake things up. Just look at Apple and the iPhone.

Re: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions

#89

Post by cremnob »

OGinparadise wrote: post #16

Fasten Your Seatbelts: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions Amazing! He studied and compared all other driver-less cars to Google's and came to this conclusion. I know a writer getting paid for clicks wouldn't forget that virtually every major car company is working on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car#History

A lot of people here seem to have the blinders on about this. It's kind of funny. I've posted this before the last time this came up. Car companies have been working on this for a while, unless Google's offering is just light years ahead of the rest, no car company is going to pay a Google tax for this tech (and it's unlikely it will be any better than what they are already working on).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017784

Re: Google's Driverless Car Is Worth Trillions

#90

Post by cynwoody »

coopdog wrote: post #15
moocow01 wrote: post #4

The market is worth trillions... not Google's solution. One thing tech reporters seem to have failed at recognizing is that this research has been taking place at every major car company out there - many many others are legitimately in the race. Ultimately its the manufacturers that get to pull the trigger on how driverless cars will become driverless.

Still, I can't help but feel that maybe Google have the final piece of the puzzle. We've had computers and sensors powerful enough for decades, only Google have all of that maps data, polished again and again by android users using maps (and now Ingress) to make it more reliable. Google almost specialise at crunching massive data into useful products, and building reliable supersystems from millions of unreliable sub…

> We've had computers and sensors powerful enough for decades, only Google have all of that maps data, polished again and again by android users using maps (and now Ingress) to make it more reliable.

Of what relevance is Google's map data (which they buy from vendors)? Google's map data doesn't tell the car if a pedestrian or another car or a fire hydrant is where it is about to go. The car has to figure that out all by itself and in real time.

Map data is neither necessary nor sufficient to drive a car.

At the scale where a driver-less car operates, the map data is only relevant as to whether it's managed to get its owner where he wants to go. If that question is still relevant, then it has succeeded.

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