Google Chief Sees End to Individual Car Ownership
It is no secret that Google Inc. (GOOG) is working on a driverless car. And according to co-founder Sergey Brin, such a car could transform the world's transportation system.
In a conversation with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla at his KV CEO Summit last week, Brin and Larry Page, Google's CEO and other co-founder, talked about a variety of Google's projects and why the company seems to try so many different things. Here is what Brin had to say about self-driving cars:
If you look at the self-driving cars, for example, I hope that that could really transform transportation around the world, and reduce the need for individual car ownership, the need for parking, road congestion and so forth. If that was successful in its own right, we would be super happy. It's obviously still a big bet. It's got many technical and policy risks. … So much land in our cities, about 30 to 50 percent is parking, which is a tremendous waste. Also, the roads themselves, which are both congested and take a lot of space are just unpleasant. So with self-driving cars, you don't really need much in the way of parking, because you don't need one car per person. They just come and get you when you need them.
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It is not hard to figure out how General Motors Co. (GM) and Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) would react to the idea of selling fewer cars. But considering the success of car-sharing services like Uber and Lyft and the number of younger Americans who don't own cars and get along just fine without them, Google could be on to something.
Brin also noted, "This is all pretty speculative. Right now, we're working hard to just get the basics … working." And getting the technology to work is the easy part.
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