If I squint my eyes and ignore all the facts that are already out there about Google's driverless cars, then I suppose this could be true.
I sometimes enjoy these sorts of articles. They're the fan-fiction of the tech world and it's no different to the sort of conjecture people like to come up with for Apple, which can be shameless fun to read.
But when there's already a ton of information out there about how Google's driverless cars work, it just seems cheap and hollow.
> all the facts that are already out there about Google's driverless cars
Are you referring here to fact that the driverless cars follow pre-determined paths rather than reading traffic signals? Or do you just mean that the proposed motivation doesn't really hold water? Because it seems pretty plausible to me that streetview data could be very useful to the drtiverless car, even if other data is more important and even if streetview is better motivated on its own.
Google's driverless cars have had a lot of PR recently, with some pretty decent coverage of how they actually work.
The cars don't follow predetermined routes. At present they do learn routes, but not using Google Street View data. Actually, the opposite is true, the intention is for the diver-less cars to generate 3d data for street view.
According to this blog post, the map data is pretty important.
> Two things seem particularly interesting about Google's approach. First, [Google's driverless car] relies on very detailed maps of the roads and terrain, something that Urmson said is essential to determine accurately where the car is. Using GPS-based techniques alone, he said, the location could be off by several meters.
I sometimes enjoy these sorts of articles. They're the fan-fiction of the tech world and it's no different to the sort of conjecture people like to come up with for Apple, which can be shameless fun to read.
But when there's already a ton of information out there about how Google's driverless cars work, it just seems cheap and hollow.
Also, I don't get the title.