>Maybe Google has no intention of making autonomous cars for normal use but exclusively for Street View.
Sounds like too much expense for just that. If the problem of street view was it's cost you could just pay people to add a StreetView system to the roof of their cars and get the data much cheaper than having your own car. They may very well want to start by using Street View to validate the technology but the end-game must be larger.
If the problem of street view was it's cost you could just pay people to add a StreetView system to the roof of their cars and get the data much cheaper than having your own car.
I think you're underestimating the number of people you'd have to pay to get full coverage of cities. Most people do not drive around on every street in a systematic way; they have a small number of destinations and they usually take the same routes between them every time.
You'd have to optimize for that. You can add incentives for people to mix up their routes, and you can use a much smaller number of dedicated cars to cover whatever is left. My point was that if the problem you're trying to solve is "StreetView is too expensive to operate" you're not going to go and create self driving cars, you'd do something simpler.
That doesn't mean that once you do have self-driving cars you wouldn't use them for that. Or even that StreetView wouldn't be the first thing you'd use them for, since that's a good way to get more training data for your algorithms. But to suggest they'd go to all the expense of creating self-driving cars to then use them just as a cost saving measure for StreetView sounds strange.
Not to kick the guy that's down, but "I wish we had more recent streetview, OH I KNOW lets build a totally autonomous car" sounds to me somewhat like "people want their postal mail online. OH I KNOW lets send somebody to every house and pick up the mail the mailman left."
Not unlike the experience for drivers on Lyft and UberX it would be trivial for Google to create a rig and an app. You set the magnetic camera rig on your roof and sign in. It shows you available routes and how much they'll pay for them. The offer increases every so often if nobody selects the route. Done.
Sounds like too much expense for just that. If the problem of street view was it's cost you could just pay people to add a StreetView system to the roof of their cars and get the data much cheaper than having your own car. They may very well want to start by using Street View to validate the technology but the end-game must be larger.