Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you completely until

> Why do self driving cars? Def no ad revenue there.

Sure there is. Many people commute in their cars for 1-2 hours per day, when it is illegal for them to look at ads on their smartphone. If Google makes this legal, it's another 10%ish increase in the waking hours that people may be clicking on their ads.

I think that Google's ambitions are a lot higher than this, of course. Self-driving cars will be a lucrative business for them in numerous ways. And increased ad revenue will be one of them.

View on HN

The business model in a self-driving car is THE SELF-DRIVING CAR...

... unless they're interested in taking in a loss for each vehicle or only selling to the richest people in the world.

The business model for the self-driving car is a computer-scheduled, dynamically-provisioned taxi service cheap enough that nobody needs to own a car in the city. Because self-driving cars don't need to park (they can just move on to the next assignment or deprovision), if they catch on then in-city parking decks can be redeveloped into business space or park space.

You forget transportation of goods. Pretty much all over-land cargo in the U.S. and most of that elsewhere (less so, because trains) could be transported by self-driving cars/drones. Not sure if that is larger or smaller than transportation of people at this point, but it's still an astronomically huge market.

Transport is something like 30% of the world economy isn't it?

US is actually pretty big in freight trains.

Mostly because, freight and passenger trains interfere badly. No passengers = easier freight. A big wave of deregulation of the market a few decades ago helped, too. The Economist ran a special about the US market a few years ago.

… that deliberately takes routes which maximise your exposure to its owners advertising, services and products.

I don't believe ad revenue in self-driving cars will be meaningful. I don't think google will force people to watch ads after they pay for being driven.Maybe only as a discount ,but most will prefer not to, the same way that today, there aren't any attractive options to watch ads for pay.

Not force, but the fact is that people will have more time to do whatever they want while their car drives them somewhere, during which many will be browsing the Internet through choice, and browsing the Internet generally involves looking at ads.

Frankly, I'm not entirely sure such a roundabout benefit even comes up in management's eyes compared to the difficulty of getting self-driving cars working and on the roads, but it is one.

I hope you realize that Google's "ad" revenues aren't only from people seeing ads. They also use the tracking information of how you use products.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com