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Is Google CEO's "Tiny Bubble Car" Yahoo CEO's "Little Bubble Car"?

Posted by timothy on from the otherwise-would-have-been-huge-and-square-I-guess dept.

theodp (442580) writes "Back in 2011, then-Google VP and now-Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer brainstormed with BMW to sketch out an idea she had for self-driving 'little bubbles' that could ease office commutes. Here's Mayer's pitch from a BMW film short: 'All I really need is a little bubble that drives itself and when it runs into something, it doesn't hurt that much...and...you know, like it doesn't actually take up that much fuel because it's so lightweight and it's good for the environment for that reason.' So, with Google's newly-built, steering wheel-less self-driving car being described as a 'tiny bubble-car', one wonders if Google CEO Larry Page's "Tiny Bubble Car" has its roots in Mayer's 'Little Bubble Car,' especially considering the striking similarity of Mayer's concept car sketch and Google's built vehicle." Seems to me there's been plenty of concept art (as well as actual tiny bubble-like cars, even if they generallly have had steering wheels) for car designers to draw on.

24 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. what's wrong with public transportation? by alen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    why can't google and everyone else support public transportation?

    lobby SF and California to build some train tracks and stops at the big corporate parks to start and build out from there to the smaller towns.

    i'm all for car ownership and driving on weekends but when you have the same trip that so many people take everyday there should be a public option

    1. Re:what's wrong with public transportation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Google and others tried a similar thing with buses.
      The Locals howled and picketed.
      The City Government pontificated and demanded money for using publicly funded (through tax dollars) bus stops.
      Google, et al, did this to provide bus transportation in the Bay Area for their employees because the infrastructure does exist to deliver their employees from their homes in the suburbs to the urban office.

      You really should try to keep up with the news.

    2. Re:what's wrong with public transportation? by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Agreed. But then all these Internet Addicts would have to actually SIT NEXT TO SOMEONE!!! Eeeew! The KOOTIES!!!!

      Public transport is the answer, but the entitled class confused nature of the California Ideology squanders forward movement for the sake of narcissism. The collateral damage is massive. Example: the asshole renting a 2 BR apt at 19th and Valencia for $10,500 a month. That comes out to about $350 a day. Someone who has that kind of dosh isn't going to want to spend time rubbing shoulders with someone who pays $1000 a month to share a flat in the Sunset. It just isn't going to happen. They're both fucking peasants (one is an extremely well paid peasant) but the well paid peasant thinks he's something special. Besides, every racist knows poor people have kooties.

      --
      Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
    3. Re:what's wrong with public transportation? by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      why can't google and everyone else support public transportation?

      lobby SF and California to build some train tracks and stops at the big corporate parks to start and build out from there to the smaller towns.

      i'm all for car ownership and driving on weekends but when you have the same trip that so many people take everyday there should be a public option

      1. Freedom.

      2. Groceries.

      3. Children.

      Not necessarily in that order.

    4. Re:what's wrong with public transportation? by afgam28 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      All government services are based on "theft" of resources from people who don't use that government service. This includes the roads that private cars drive on, which are funded in part by gasoline taxes but mostly through non-user-pays revenue streams such as income taxes.

    5. Re:what's wrong with public transportation? by artfulshrapnel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I mean, the short list? Off the top of my head this solves problems like:

      - Public transit only becomes economically viable above certain volumes. Anyone in too small an area doesn't have access to it and never will.
      - Sometimes public transit doesn't run where you want it to go, especially if you need to make an unusual trip.
      - Sometimes people need to go places at times when public transit isn't running, or need to go faster than public transit will allow.
      - Some people are disabled, and would have a hard time getting to the nearest public transit stop even in an area that supports it.

      There are lots of reasons why this is a useful solution. So many people in my city (Boston) keep a car that they use about once a week for odd or off-hours trips. A solution like this would take all those cars off the side of the road and replace them with about 1/20th the number of shared cars.

    6. Re:what's wrong with public transportation? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      are you kidding, California is nearly bankrupt.

      Even a state teetering on bankruptcy can fund boondoggles by issuing bonds payable in the far future. California is in the process of building a bullet train from SF to LA, that is budgeted at nearly $100 BILLION, and take 30 years to complete. On average, these big ticket projects run over budget by a factor of three, so it they will likely burn through $300 billion or more before it is completed, or cancelled. That will be about $10 million per seat. The projected cost of a ticket on the train is far higher than the cost of driving a car or taking a plane, so it will likely serve rich people with more money than time.

    7. Re:what's wrong with public transportation? by tofu2go · · Score: 2

      Why can't these bubble cars be the public transportation option? I.e. public transportation does not have to mean mass/joint transit. Rather than predefined stops that people get on and off at at fixed times, these cars could be made available to the public at any time of day to get them where they need to go with zero stops along the way. Just pay the fare like you would a bus or taxi ride. It would be nice if you could call a service from your mobile, send your GPS location, and have them automatically send out a car too you at an appointed time. And if there is inter-car communication, perhaps these cars can automatically coordinate themselves to minimize traffic jams and further reduce transit times, and maybe they can even drive bumper to bumper (at distances that a human driver cannot do safely) for improved efficiency (drafting). There are possibilities here.

    8. Re:what's wrong with public transportation? by rubycodez · · Score: 3, Informative

      no, California can't do that any more, massive amounts of bonds already issued (tens of billions of dollars worth) haven't been bought yet as investors are wise to California's plight

    9. Re:what's wrong with public transportation? by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      why can't google and everyone else support public transportation?

      Because even when public transportation is good, it still takes longer to get places. I saw a survey of drivers in LA once. Something like 70% of the people surveyed wanted improved public transportation........so that other people would take the train and the roads would be cleared for them.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    10. Re: what's wrong with public transportation? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Informative

      Please give me some sort of source to your claim.

      According to this page the average number of bus passengers in the UK is 9, and buses get about 6 MPG. So that is 54 passenger-miles per gallon, which is about as good as one person in an electric car, or two people in a gasoline powered car. But even that overstates the case for buses, since they drive a fixed non-optimal route, where a car goes directly to the passenger's destination, so the "miles" are not equivalent.

    11. Re: what's wrong with public transportation? by Rockoon · · Score: 2

      So public transport is more efficient so long as we declare that its more efficient?

      Nice.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    12. Re:what's wrong with public transportation? by QRDeNameland · · Score: 2

      All government services are based on "theft" of resources from people who don't use that government service. This includes the roads that private cars drive on, which are funded in part by gasoline taxes but mostly through non-user-pays revenue streams such as income taxes.

      Which "non-users" would those be? Even among those who do not own a motor vehicle, how many of them buy no products or services or otherwise engage in the modern economy; or rely on no public services like fire depts, ambulances, police, post office, all of which are dependent on those roads to function?

      Unless you are living a more off-the grid lifestyle than Dick Proenneke, you can not honestly claim to be a "non-user" of the road system.

      --
      Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
    13. Re:what's wrong with public transportation? by immaterial · · Score: 2

      That's kind of the point - government services are (should be) to the benefit of society as a whole, and since we all live together in society, we all reap the benefits even when it isn't immediately obvious. People without children may complain their taxes fund schools - but those schools allow them to live in a society where even the poor are educated enough to have decent prospects (instead of falling to desperation and crime), where employers can expect a decently educated workforce, etc. Even if you're a rich man driving a private limo everywhere (in the strict, immediate sense a non-user of public transport), public transportation reduces traffic for you, reduces pollution for you, and ensures that the poors who shine your $1000 shoes can get from home to their shoeshine stations.

    14. Re:what's wrong with public transportation? by Jeremi · · Score: 3, Informative

      are you kidding, California is nearly bankrupt.

      No, it isn't.

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  2. Law of headlines by rasmusbr · · Score: 2

    Betteridge's law of headlines says no and the summary pretty much nails it.

    The bubble shape maximizes the amount of internal volume given an amount of materials, or minimizes the amount of materials needed to make a car with a given volume. Take a bubble and attach crumple zones front and back and you have the shape of a typical car. I suppose the idea is that these self-driving cars won't need crumple zones. We'll see about that...

  3. Re:Who cares? by rubycodez · · Score: 4, Informative

    how about this, or is this 1942 car too futuristic? http://www.inautonews.com/six-...

  4. Cardiff by johnsie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Cardiff city in Wales were planning to have driverless taxis. The project was cancelled though because committees. http://www.theguardian.com/bus...

  5. Self driving cars offer way more advantages by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Interesting

    why can't google and everyone else support public transportation?

    I like public transportation to some degree, but self-driving cars are WAY more useful.

    They could really get anyone from anywhere, to anywhere. With public transport you might have to arrange a few transfers, defiantly have to figure out how to get to a pickup location. And it may not go very close to where you want to go.

    But a self-driving car solves all those issues. If you think longer term, you could even have self-driving public transports that took a group of people going to roughly the same place to where they wanted to go with a few stops along the way.

    So getting self driving cars working helps public transport as much as private transport...

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  6. It's a PRT by Animats · · Score: 2

    Lots of little shared-use autonomous pod cars running around? That's a PRT, a Personal Rapid Transit system. The idea has been around for decades, and a few prototype vehicles have been built. Older designs were rail based. Later designs used guideways, but the vehicle had some steering smarts. The latest designs steer themselves, but still use dedicated roads. Nothing much has been deployed, except for a few small systems at airports and fairs.

  7. Re:CEO in a Bubble by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Are you nuts?

    The SMART is hugely popular and has been so for over a decade. In europe they are one of the most common cars seen on the roads. It's the bullshit that the USA forced on it that makes it a failure in the usa. The SMART is safer than most cars made in the USA, but they had to add a lot of useless safety crap to meet US regs designed to stifle importation. Europe and Canadian safety regs are good, but US regs are designed to stifle importation of cheap cars.

    Then they did stupid shit like not importing the Diesel model that get's well over 60mpg. it sells rapidly in Canada, but you cant buy on in the USA. Maybe if the US regulations would allow a real SMART here the ones that sell for $7800 NEW in Europe they would sell like freaking hotcakes as they would be the most affordable car sold and have a market that is huge.

    Instead we have only a handful of dealers so anyone that buys one has to have it serviced 150-400 miles away. They choose to not buy one because Mercedes is stupid and will not let the cars be serviced at a standard Mercedes dealership.

    Lastly, they took so long to get it here, they got stomped on by toyota. the iQ is all the car the smart is with a dealer network to get it fixed all over the place. Plus it has a huge advantage of being built in the USA so they can side step all the roadblocks that were in front of the SMART. But the iQ is overpriced at $17,000. It's a $9,000 car and the morons at Toyota refuse to sell it as such. Instead they pile all kinds of extra crap in it to try and justify it's sky high price tag. Same problem as the Smart. Overpriced because the executives are too stupid to know how to price a tiny commuter car so that it sells like hotcakes.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  8. Re:CEO in a Bubble by mean+pun · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... The other bubble car - Mercedes Smart is a failure in every sense of the word.

    For a failure it is doing remarkably well. Here in Europe it has now been for sale for more than a decade, and there are no signs that its market is collapsing. It's true that not everyone is driving it, but if that is the benchmark, nowadays all cars are failures.

    And the Google bubble car will be as popular as Segway.

    The Segway also doesn't look like it will go away in the near future, it has found a few niches (e.g. getting around fast in large buildings such as airports and shopping malls, and guided tours for tourists).

    Also, Google's bubble car is just an experimental platform for now.

  9. Jealous much? by mmell · · Score: 2
    Just thought I'd ask. That's a pretty broad brush you're painting with.

    How do you feel about the opposite sex, or people of different ethnicity than you?

  10. No - Google's has advanced beyond napkin sketch st by itomato · · Score: 2

    A wishful thought (with a happy countenance) vs. an actualized prototype?