The One Mistake Google Keeps Making

HughPickens.com writes Gene Marks writes in Forbes Magazine that Google has brought us innovations that have literally changed our world yet the company continues to make the same mistake over and over. Google's mistake, which it keeps making, is building great products that no one will soon buy. Take Google Glass — a great idea with great technology that demonstrates the future power of the Internet of Things. There's just one problem: no one is buying Google Glass. And now there are driverless cars. After 700,000 miles of open road testing, Google has introduced its "first real build" of its driverless car and it's pretty amazing. But the mistake is the same as with Glass: it's a product without customers. "It's Google assuming that someday someone will actually buy a driverless car," writes Marks. "Not a hobbyist or an eccentric millionaire. But a customer who actually needs or desires a driverless car. Someone who, given the choice of spending $30K on a car that they fully control and can go anywhere they want at any speed they want – or another, likely more expensive buggy that will only travel on certain routes at slower speeds and with less options." Which car would you buy?

For driverless cars to work, to decrease congestion, increase safety, reduce lawsuits and lower our insurance premiums everyone would have to be driving one. For the driverless car system to truly work as desired, there would need to be more centralized control over our entire transportation system, from the roads and highways to the cars we're allowed to use, the speed we're allowed to travel and the places we're allowed to go. This, in the very country where the majority of the population fights against government regulations, red tape and bureaucracy. "But rest assured – Google knows this. They're not looking for short term profits," concludes Marks. "The dreamers behind Google, like the dreamers at Tesla and Virgin Galactic are people who are looking decades ahead."

Comments

They said that about cell phones

[TechyImmigrant]

But those early cell phone innovators got a lot of patents.
Google is probably rolling on driverless car and wearable tech patents.

Re:They said that about cell phones

[Kierthos]

Yeah, but the time limit is 20 years. It's not the OMGWTF time limit on copyrights in the U.S. (life of the creator plus 70 years, or 120 years for corporate copyright), but it's long enough to get some money out of it.

I mean, think about it. 20 years ago, cell phones were fairly large things that could really only make/receive phone calls. Now look at what they can do.

So, yeah, right now, you can't do much with Google Glass or a driverless car. But where will we be in terms of those things in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years?

Re:They said that about cell phones

[Penguinisto]

I remember when the iPhone was released and people said the same thing.

Google is sitting on a mountain of IP for both projects. Some companies look a bit beyond next quarter's results.

Bit of a difference, though... the iPhone, when it first came out, actually provided a lot of gee-whiz stuff that (as it turns out) folks actually wanted and could use. It also had at least some competition at the time - blackberries predominant among them in North America. The difference was the UI, a *much* larger screen, and a greatly expanded set of features. The price was also not too far out of reach; a top-end Blackberry cost something like $500-$600 anyway, so $699 (I think?) for a mid-range iPhone 1 wasn't a bad deal.

Google Glass? Umm, okay. It costs far more than it delivers (as in, what does it really *do* besides display and record video/audio for that much money?)

Driverless cars? A better feature proposition (it'd make the commute much easier and enjoyable), but the feature is limited to certain roads/speeds, and after seeing the price hikes for a hybrid, one can only imagine what the driverless feature set will cost you as someone out shopping for a new car.

Re:They said that about cell phones

[Jason Levine]

It's a timing problem. If wait to invent it, somebody will beat you to it. But if you invent it too early, nobody will buy it before the patents run out. Companies are taken to task for being "Me too" organizations who let others pioneer and just follow up. Google might be trying out things that people might not want, but many times you don't know what people are going to use until after it's invented. I'd rather see Google trying new things and failing many times than deciding "We only do this one thing and that's it. Zero innovation from this point on." The latter is the path to stagnation.

Re:They said that about cell phones

[Charliemopps]

But those early cell phone innovators got a lot of patents.
Google is probably rolling on driverless car and wearable tech patents.

You're dead on... I came here to post the same thing. Gene Marks is an idiot. Googles trying to figure out everything that will be needed to make a driverless car in the future... or Google Glass... Once they have it pretty much down they'll likely just dump the product and let everyone else build it while they skim a fortune off the top.

On top of that... look at android. They don't care about selling the OS... it's free. They just don't want companies like Apple and Microsoft closing the ecosystem and preventing Google from making money. Valves doing the same thing with SteamOS. They don't WANT to make an OS but when the big players, Microsoft and Apple, are openly hostile to their business model, they have to go out of their way to promote the OS that's agnostic... Linux.

Smart Business decisions aren't always about making 2% more profit next quarter. Some are about making 50% more profit 10yrs from now. If more corporations though in the long term like Google, and less in the short term like Mr Gene Marks and all the banks that collapsed our economy revently, we'd all be better off.

Re:They said that about cell phones

[Ambassador Kosh]

I would love to see what you could do with google glass targeted to technicians and engineers at a chemical plant. Set it up with augmented reality systems so that you can look at any pipe in the system and see the pressure, flow rate, concentrations etc. It would make it FAR easier and faster to keep an eye on equipment than we do now. It would also make it much easier for technicians to look around and see what equipment they are going to do to adjust soon.

Google glass needs some time to mature but there are many industrial applications for it.

I would love to have a self driving car. I HATE driving. Right now I live somewhere that i don't have to drive but once I move to somewhere where I do need to drive I definitely want to get a self driving car and affording it won't be a problem.

Re:They said that about cell phones

[minstrelmike]

I think a big difference with the iPhone is that Steve Jobs, regardless of personal faults, was trying to solve a problem that bothered _him_.
Same with the folks that built the first search engines, including googol.
Now the company is trying to solve social problems, not personal ones, by using engineering techniques, not political or marketing ones.
Society works according to certain principles, all socio-biological, not engineering-mechanical. Whether it should work that way or not is useless philosophizing. We got where we are today by using those processes and those same processes are going to get us to tomorrow. Or not. The results are optional; the process is not.

Newsflash. Entertainment is bigger than intellectualism. The problem Jobs addressed was how to listen to more music. The problem Google first addressed was how to find web sites, because the searchers were highly interested in finding them.The National Enquirer outsells the New York Times. Not because of the quality of the news; it is because of the quality of the citizenry.

Re:They said that about cell phones

[penandpaper]

Driverless cars? A better feature proposition (it'd make the commute much easier and enjoyable), but the feature is limited to certain roads/speeds, and after seeing the price hikes for a hybrid, one can only imagine what the driverless feature set will cost you as someone out shopping for a new car.

I think you underestimate the potential demographic of drivers that only need limited access to roads and speeds. The elderly for one.

How many large demographics would jump at the opportunity for even "limited road access and limited speed "? My guess is large enough to be a descent success at the right price.

As for the costs, I am sure there is a point at which it is still profitable for Google and affordable to customers. Even if the first generation is a luxury item for wealthy andor semi-wealthy, prices will eventually come down. If Musk can do it with Tesla (assuming he accomplishes a 30k roadster) why can't Google do it for a driver-less car in a some odd years?

Re:They said that about cell phones

[mlts]

Google knows Google Glass was a fairly niche technology, and that there would be some pushback against it. However, Google are true pioneers in this area, and pioneers are the ones with the arrows sticking out of their wagons.

The problem is that traffic isn't going away. Google's autonomous vehicles solve the problem in an effective way that few other modes of transport can, especially of one factors the inconsistent densities in US cities. Traffic is a problem that needs to be addressed, and most cities can't (or in Austin's case, won't) deal with the problem. So, the only real party that can do anything about it is an innovative corporation.

This isn't something that will pay off next quarter. However, this is a major infrastructure change, and it will affect positively the quality of life for all involved.

There are many benefits:

Roads can be designed a lot simpler because they wouldn't have to be as idiot proof as they are now. In fact, highways can intersect each other with a four-way, unmarked intersection, with car computers timing each car to go through and slowing down/speeding up traffic as needed.

Roads will be safer. Press the crosswalk button, cars will stop, and pedestrians can cross. Cyclists won't be victim to the "right hook" even though they might be on the sidewalk, going opposite of traffic, or otherwise technically not riding legally.

With smaller distances between cars (a computer can stop a hell of a lot faster than a person), a road can almost double its carrying capacity.

With destinations known, cars can be moved to proper lanes to make traffic flow as optimal as possible, where cars going on a road a longer distance go to the left-most lanes, while vehicles exiting go to the right.

DWI and distracted driving will be a thing of the past.

Vehicles can be optimized for usefulness. If someone has a long commute, they can buy a van [1] and sleep during the commute. Or read. Or use that time for something productive.

When a vehicle needs maintenance, it can go to the shop at night, and be ready for the road in the morning. This cuts down a lot of hassle.

Vehicles can be used for unmanned deliveries. Have a list of groceries, the vehicle can take that, head down to the store, the stuff gets loaded, and the vehicle back, all in time for breakfast in the morning.

Self-driving cars are not just an invention. They are an ecosystem, just like electricity, and can improve daily life by a large amount.

[1]: A Dodge ProMaster van (the US equivalent of the Fiat Ducato) diesel can get 30MPG in real numbers. The Mercedes Sprinter with the four-banger OM651 is just as good.

Re:They said that about cell phones

[NewWorldDan]

Exactly. Also I doubt Google wants to be in the business of making and servicing cars. They want to be the technology platform that you don't see, that Ford and Toyota are paying $1000/car royalties on. That's where the monopoly market is and that's where they want to be.

Re:They said that about cell phones

[meta-monkey]

If Glass were affordable and worked a little better than I think it does, I could definitely see uses. I'd love it just so when I'm working on my car or assembling furniture for my kid or whatever I could have the PDF manual in my field of view without having to look away or use my hands. And it would be great for when I'm taking something apart to repair or tinker. Record the entire tear down process so when you're putting it back together and you run into that "no where did this wire go...?" problem you can scrub back through the video.

I couldn't see walking around with Glass every day. Even though I do wear glasses so it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for me, there would be that whole "glasshole" problem. But for special use stuff? Some really great applications I can think of.

Re:They said that about cell phones

[Strangely Familiar]

Driverless cars open up huge possibilities. Think of long distance trips, where the drive is eight hours. With a driverless car, this eight hours could be spent overnight, so you go to sleep in your car in Plainfield, CT, and wake up in Jamestown, NY. (OK, maybe you need to wake up once to refuel). You didn't lose any time getting there! Right now, you can't get a plane or public transportation from one destination to the other without a lot of logistical connections. Flying might be a six or seven hour ordeal, and driving around eight. Also, I would have killed for this car at certain times in my life where my commute was upwards of 40 minutes of white knuckle driving each way. I could actually work on my way to work. If the car could also be passengerless, even more possibilities open up. What about taking the kids to school. Busses aren't always available, especially for private schools. Putting my oldest in a driverless car could save me over an hour each day. What about sharing the car or renting it out? A driverless car could make me money while I am at work. There could be an Uber or Lyft like app that would allow me to put the car to work, recouping my costs. And doesn't this make remote shopping more possible? Where I pick out my stuff online, and send my car to get it? Someone at the store just rings it up and puts it in my car? Picking up folks at the airport? Just send my car...

Re:They said that about cell phones

[bigpat]

For robotic cars to succeed they will have to work on existing infrastructure and share roads with human drivers. Everyone knows that except for the original author. Robotic cars aren't about designing a better transportation network, it is about designing a better driver. Every bit of the premise of this thread is faulty:

For driverless cars to work, to decrease congestion, increase safety, reduce lawsuits and lower our insurance premiums everyone would have to be driving one. For the driverless car system to truly work as desired, there would need to be more centralized control over our entire transportation system, from the roads and highways to the cars we're allowed to use, the speed we're allowed to travel and the places we're allowed to go. This, in the very country where the majority of the population fights against government regulations, red tape and bureaucracy.

For robotic cars to be successful they will have to be just as effective with one robotic car on the road as with a dozen or a million. For robotic cars to be successful they will have to have navigational control local to the car following a simple set of driving rules with minimal or no reliance on outside systems. For robotic cars to be successful they will have to work on dirt roads as well as they do on highways and city streets. For robotic cars to be successful they will have to sometimes go above the speed limit in certain circumstances. For robotic cars to be successful laws will have to recognize that the passenger is not in control of the vehicle and therefore is not legally responsible or liable for the operation or the results. For robotic cars to be successful they will need to be allowed by government regulations and not enabled by them. We need government to treat robotic drivers like they do human drivers... if they can pass a driving test then they should be allowed on the road. So autonomous driving systems will need to be certified by government regulators, certainly, but they shouldn't face a slew of requirements that human drivers don't have.

Robotic cars are not about creating a new transportation system, it is about fixing a design flaw in the current system that causes tens of thousands of deaths each year: the human driver.

`

The one mistake Forbes keeps making..

[faedle]

.. is assuming everybody is profit-motivated and is actually driven by "bringing something to market." Glass and the driverless car are both examples of Google's desire to simply push the threshold of technology to its limits. It's a product of "why not" thinking, and profit be damned.

As far as I'm concerned, Google has a product they're very successful at. Why not spend some of those dividends out on the fringe? That's how progress happens: sometimes you learn something (I'm sure the driverless car initiative has had lots of implications for Maps' imaging) you didn't expect.

Re:The one mistake Forbes keeps making..

[Mr2cents]

This article is basically saying that research and innovation are bad. That's fucked up if you ask me.

Re:The one mistake Forbes keeps making..

[Noah Haders]

here's the secret: google at heart is a really boring company. they write algorithms to do internet searches, and other algorithms to place ads. then they make 80% of their revenue on ads. This is basically the same thing that yahoo does, and this terrifies the google execs. They stay up at night worrying, what can we do to keep from turning into the next yahoo?

the only answer is to hire really smart and passionate people, but in order to attract and keep them you need to give them really cool things to do. really smart and passionate people don't want to make bleeding edge technology to push more ads. So they have their "20% time" policy, along with their google x projects, which are just ways to keep their workforce engaged while they improve search and ad placement.

In a way, it doesn't even matter if these things make it to market or are successful, because any hobbyist knows that the fun is in designing and building something. When interest wanes or a key person leaves the company, they shut down the product and move on to something else.

Re:The one mistake Forbes keeps making..

[CrankyFool]

Yes, because in the world of search, for example, Google's getting their lunch handed to them by, erm, hold on a second ... Bing?

Re:The one mistake Forbes keeps making..

[faedle]

And that's the greater point. Google's core business has no competition, and likely never will have any.

"Moon" projects do have positive effects on Google's bottom line and stock price. The whole way Google is managing their value to investors is saying "if you're a day trader, we aren't your stock." And at the price Google has been able to maintain their stock (consistently around $530 / share for at least a year now) they likely have VERY patient stockholders. You aren't holding GOOG if you expect mammoth returns on the short. You're expecting modest to acceptable returns on the short, and you've invested on the POSSIBILITY that Google WILL hit the Next Big Thing and only get bigger.

And the only way that is going to happen is if one of these "moon shot" projects does, in fact, deliver. And you can argue it has: Glass has implications for Android, and while it hasn't happened yet for wearables it's pushing the whole industry towards thinking about wearable systems. Someone will hit on a system that works, and there's good odds it will be Google or Apple. Hold both those stocks and you Can't Lose(tm).

Re:The one mistake Forbes keeps making..

[SydShamino]

Forbes is driven by MBA-types looking for next-quarter results. Of course they don't understand the concept of long-term research. If anyone today has taken up the mantle of research dropped by Bell Labs and GE, it would be Google and Elon Musk.

While some of Elon's ventures are public (now), the pure research is all done with his private money. Only Google is doing research as a public company with loud investors who'd rather pump-n-dump.

Re:The one mistake Forbes keeps making..

[Minwee]

This article is basically saying that research and innovation are bad. That's fucked up if you ask me.

The article is saying that research and innovation don't make money. The default assumption that that means they are bad is a whole other problem.

Re:The one mistake Forbes keeps making..

[hey!]

Well, of course Google wants to bring products to market. The problem is that you can't take an organization that's fine tuned to efficiently deliver the same service or product year after year, then suddenly demand it start acting "innovative" when it becomes necessary to move with the times. So a lot depends on how likely you think it is that your business will be disrupted.

Suppose your company makes dog food. If you're forward looking, you might do a little R&D in dog nutrition and taste preferences, but change in your industry is incremental. People don't change dog food brands that often, and they certainly aren't going to stop using dog food altogether and start using something else. So developing products that won't immediately succeed in the market is clearly wasteful if you're in that business.

Technology isn't like that. People sometimes stop using one kind of product and start using others (netbooks to tablets) almost overnight. Wildly successful companies that don't move with the times see their sales dry up and in a few short years are sold for scrap (Digital Equipment, Palm, Compaq etc.). If you don't want to become obsolete faster than you can adapt, you have to be willing to speculate. And one of hardest things about speculation is knowing when the time is right for a product, far enough in advance to hit the mark. This was Steve Jobs' genius. People think he invented the tablet, but companies had been creating tablet like products for years without success -- including Apple. Jobs saw when the combination of processor, battery, display and wireless networking technology converged to make a tablet people would want to use possible.

And since demonstrably very few companies have this knack for hitting the mark, it follows that a company that tries to stay innovative creates quite a few premature products.

Flexibility, innovation and know-how aren't reflected on a company's balance sheet, so from a certain standpoint building those things looks like waste. And truthfully it sometimes *is* waste when a company invests in R&D but for whatever reason the company fails to make use of it to adapt. Nobody can really be sure, until the time comes.

Re:The one mistake Forbes keeps making..

[desdinova 216]

remember Forbes is a publication geared to the Day Trader investment "I only care about the next quarter at most" crowd not people who think long term

Re:The one mistake Forbes keeps making..

[swillden]

the only answer is to hire really smart and passionate people, but in order to attract and keep them you need to give them really cool things to do. really smart and passionate people don't want to make bleeding edge technology to push more ads. So they have their "20% time" policy, along with their google x projects, which are just ways to keep their workforce engaged while they improve search and ad placement.

The problem with your argument is that very few of Google's engineers work on search or ad placement, and those that do, by and large, don't work on other stuff. As a Google employee, I'll readily admit that the coolness factor of Google's moonshot projects does give me warm fuzzies, but those warm fuzzies don't really affect me on a day-to-day basis -- and I don't really need them because the stuff I do work on is actually plenty cool all on its own. I know some search engineers and some ad engineers, and they're really engaged in what they're doing, too... in fact, I'd argue that your basic premise, that search and ads are boring, is completely wrong as well.

Search, for example, is a really, really hard problem, for many reasons. To start with, the web is huge and continues growing rapidly, so the architectures and algorithms needed to handle that scale are pretty fascinating on their own. Speed is another really interesting challenge; Google wants to serve results, end to end, in well under a second (the actual target is often-discussed, but I don't know if it's confidential so I won't mention it). This requires not just making Google's systems very fast, but demands research into optimizing the user's browser and the Internet itself. Then there's the problem whose initial solution made Google into a success: Given some search terms and given a corpus of scraped data, how you do provide the best results? And the only reasonable definition of "best" is "the ones the user wants". PageRank was a good first approximation, but if Google were to go back to simple PageRank today everyone would abandon it in a hurry because today's ranking algorithms are far, far better. But they're still a long way from done. Significant recent improvements have come from the Knowledge Graph project, which aims to enable the search engine (and other stuff) with some degree of semantic knowledge about the queries and the content. To really solve search, you actually need to fully understand all of the content on the web and also make high-quality guesses about what the user is actually looking for. Larry Page often says that search is about 5% done.

Ad serving is actually a very similar problem. You have a corpus of ads. You want to display ads that the user finds useful. Or, ideally, if you can determine that nothing in your corpus is really useful to the user, display nothing. The perfect ad-serving system will serve no ads most of the time, showing only ads for items that a user wants to buy, when they want to buy it, and you have relatively little contextual information to use to make that decision. There are other issues as well. For example you want to maximize ad revenue which means you need to take into account the advertisers' bids, but in the long run users will more often click on ads if they have good experiences with the ones they choose, so there's a vague sense of user experience value as well. Choosing not to display any ads sometimes is part of maximizing user satisfaction as well. Arguably, doing all of this perfectly is an even harder problem than search.

So... no. Google doesn't do all of its moonshots merely to keep its employees interested. If that were the reason, it would be both unnecessary and ineffective.

The real reason, I think, is pretty straightforward. Google is looking for the next $100B product. Google was built on one solution that became massively successful. At the time, it wasn't even obvious how to monetize it. What was clear was that there was a challenging problem to solve, and that the solution would be useful

The Driverless Car - Any Day of the Week

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Someone who, given the choice of spending $30K on a car that they fully control and can go anywhere they want at any speed they want – or another, likely more expensive buggy that will only travel on certain routes at slower speeds and with less options." Which car would you buy?

The Driverless Car - Any Day of the Week.

I commute. I always have. I've been dreaming of my own private "pod" that someone else drove while I read, created, slept or talked for 30+ plus years now. Bring it.

How is it a mistake?

[machineghost]

From the blurb:

"the company continues to make the same mistake over and over. Google's mistake, ..."

"But rest assured – Google knows this. They're not looking for short term profits"

So, it's a mistake ... but they know exactly what they're doing and they're not trying to make short term profits, which means it's not a mistake?

Re:How is it a mistake?

[bluefoxlucid]

It's not, and it's not real.

Google made or acquired Gmail, GTalk/Hangouts, Plus, Picasa, Youtube, Docs, an OAuth thing, Chrome, Android, Glass, driverless cars, and so on. Lots of Google products have failed; lots have succeeded.

Google makes things which give them options for monetization, licensing, or new things. The Google car, Google glass, they get Google press and create markets (Google Glass basically created the wearables market; smart watches took over after that, rather than smart glasses). Future potential is there, but so is cross-potential: Google Glass and Android smart watches both share similar characteristics, so many of the same problems solved for one apply to the other. Google's self-driving car might see upgrades and porting into GM and Tesla offerings. It could happen.

By and large, the most important impact of Google's constant experimentation is the sweeping domination of a multitude of markets. Android brought hundreds of millions of users to Google and GMail, ripe for serving ads through that little bar at the top of Gmail. Hangouts brings people to Gmail. Plus was a flop, but is still tangentially used: Google Pictures is Google Plus, and Google Plus is tied into Picasa. People use Picasa. People use Google Docs and Google Drive.

All of these things are things that stuck. Google Drive now sells storage space; sharing links to Google Drive attracts people to Google services. Chrome attracts people to Chromebooks, which attracts them to Google Drive, Gmail, and so on. Failed products could have been these things, but weren't; successful products could have been failed products, but were attempted anyway, and didn't fail.

That's what Google does: they make shit, and see what sticks.

I think there is a world market for maybe ...

[Guillermito]

... five computers.

Google's Outsourced Marketing Department

[Qzukk]

that will only travel on certain routes at slower speeds and with less options

Hey! That sounds like my daily commute! Thanks Forbes dude, you've sold me!

Gene Marks is VERY dumb

[TheDarkMaster]

How this guy writes to Forbes? He is either incredibly naive or stupid to think that Google shound have to stop having ideas just because some of them are not paying off instantly as the new generation of investors demands.

Idiot Alert x2

[djbckr]

First, the author of the article. Only an idiot would think normal consumers would actually buy this car. It's going to be pay-by-ride, almost like a taxi but without a driver.

Second, HughPickens, who thinks people actually like what he has to say - and repeats the idiot author - which makes him just as much of an idiot.

Please, for the love of $DEITY, go away

Laughably wrong.

[LightningBolt!]

Google glass may be a failure because it may never be socially acceptable.

But in 10 years, every new car sold in the US, including the lowest-end Fiesta, will have options for some degree of automated driving. At the very least, there will be a driverless highway mode.

This is happening. And it's happening quickly.

Re:Not quite without customers...

[gweilo8888]

And you'd have to root it if you wanted to choose where to go yourself, rather than Google choosing your destination for you. (But that would still be better than the Apple car, which would only allow you to travel to Apple stores.)

Lose the agenda

[Anonymous Coward]

From the summary:

For the driverless car system to truly work as desired, there would need to be more centralized control over our entire transportation system, from the roads and highways to the cars we're allowed to use, the speed we're allowed to travel and the places we're allowed to go.

This is a red herring. The submitter is proposing an extreme solution to a non-problem. Driverless technology has already adapted to the current system, and Google has already proven that it can work within the current system. Google's cars know what the speed limit is, they know where they're "allowed to go" (what is this, kindergarden?), and they don't require a borg-like homogeneity. And the technology isn't even mature yet! Clearly, there is no need to overhaul the current system. Incremental changes, as necessary, will do just fine -- just like they always have. But wait...

in the very country where the majority of the population fights against government regulations, red tape and bureaucracy

Aha. Here the submitter finally reveals his agenda. He's an authoritarian who favors top-down, centralized political control. Judging by his desire to head down this tangent, he was focused more on spreading his ideals than discussing actual driverless technology -- before he even sat down to write the summary.

Author is wrong

[gurps_npc]

Their is a HUGE market for driver-less cars today. Granted we do need to work out the laws and insurance.

But those things always come after the product is invented, not before.

People that would love to buy a driverless car for 60 thousand right RIGHT THIS MINUTE, include:

1) Any wealthy person whose kid got into an accident that they swear they were not drinking.

2) Any one whose parents are 70+ and doesn't see quite as well as they used to, but they still are active and need a car to get around.

3) Every single person that owns a taxi service that they have to pay a driver 30K a year and is seeing Uber etc. still their business.

4) Every single city that has bus drivers or garbage trucks,

Granted, their may also be union concerns when it comes to bus drivers/garbage truck drivers.

But the market is there, it already exists. It is up to us humans to solve the purely social problems caused by the legal system, the insurance industry, and unions.

I'll buy a driverless car when...

[Lab Rat Jason]

... it can pull a trailer, and back it into a driveway... or back it into the water. (think launching a boat) ... it can determine when a road is flooded, and choose NOT to enter the water. ... it can "feel" how much mass it is moving (think towing a large mass and needing to increase stopping distance/safety margin) ... it can anticipate snow conditions and make judgements about routes, grades, and plow frequencies (pull over and wait for a plow) ... it can make the decision to use the oncoming lane, because the travel lane is blocked, even if there are no signs/indicators that divert traffic. ... it can drive down a dirt road. ... it can make the decision to put it in the ditch because that was the best option (think pedestrian incursion, animal incursion, etc)

To me, driving is so much more than getting from a to b... we climb in our cars to escape the environment outside (especially in the winter), but driving is about understanding the environment outside, and making choices accordingly. I fully believe that driverless cars will eventually overcome all of these obstacles, but I'll likely be one of the last to buy, because my requirements are the highest. I don't need a car for commuting... I need a car for all the other things I do.