"These maps contain the exact three-dimensional location of streetlights, stop signs, crosswalks, lane markings, and every other crucial aspect of a roadway."
"But the maps necessary for the Google car are an order of magnitude more complicated. In fact, when I first wrote about the car for MIT Technology Review, Google admitted to me that the process it currently uses to make the maps are too inefficient to work in the country as a whole."
"To create them, a dedicated vehicle outfitted with a bank of sensors first makes repeated passes scanning the roadway to be mapped. The data is then downloaded, with every square foot of the landscape pored over by both humans and computers to make sure that all-important real-world objects have been captured. This complete map gets loaded into the car's memory before a journey"
"The company frequently says that its car has driven more than 700,000 miles safely, but those are the same few thousand mapped miles, driven over and over again."
"Chris Urmson, director of the Google car team, told me that if the car came across a traffic signal not on its map, it could potentially run a red light, simply because it wouldn't know to look for the signal."
Google's entire business advantage is based on cloud. I welcome anyone to prove that this has changed.
Nobody's saying their cool little 3D renders aren't awesome looking, but that doesn't really mean much. Google has PR down to an art form, but if you asked Google to drive one of their cars to Chicago, they couldn't do it, no matter what the weather. They only work in a small nearly closed course environment.
> if you asked Google to drive one of their cars to Chicago, they couldn't do it
Nobody here is making that claim.
If Google operated a taxi service within Austin, we would say the car operates at level 3. SAE levels say nothing about where the car is operating:
"At SAE Level 3, an automated system can both actually conduct some parts of the driving task and monitor the driving environment in some instances, but the human driver must be ready to take back control when the automated system requests"
