Currently the biggest challenge of UBER is regulatory - cities are fighting it tooth and nail. One way to exert strong political pressure is to offer a real breakthrough new service for the mass population(and not something like UBER which is an incremental innovation targeted for a small section of the population). This also fits with the breakthrough mentality shown by google's leaders.
Such service could work like UBER for public transit[1], basically enabling people to share rides with multiple other people while decreasing the costs significantly and maybe making such a service an viable alternative to private transportation. Such an offer would be hard for politicians to resist for long.
One key to enable such service at scale, is access to plenty of people and their real-time travel data, and having an ability to offer them an highly targeted ad + route + service. That sound perfect for google+UBER. Like a huge market they're positioned perfectly for.
I've got to think this is a big play for their self driving cars.
1) The new map data moves to show how super advanced their capabilities measuring real time data so people build more trust.
2) Uber is also a likely bridge to the mass population accepting self driving cars. First we ditch our own cars for ubers (which are everywhere according to google maps), then when Google decides to swap out the human with AI, it won't be as a drastic jump from where we are now.
More so: let's think about speed of adoption. It takes much less time to replace a small fleet of public transportation vehicles than the huge private fleet we have today.
And from a business model perspective , if an automated car manufacturer wants to compete , he has to start building a public transportation service now. But cars manufacturers have wrong incentives and bad capabilities for such tasks.
So this practically guarantees Google will win a large share of the automated transportation market from the car companies.
Such service could work like UBER for public transit[1], basically enabling people to share rides with multiple other people while decreasing the costs significantly and maybe making such a service an viable alternative to private transportation. Such an offer would be hard for politicians to resist for long.
One key to enable such service at scale, is access to plenty of people and their real-time travel data, and having an ability to offer them an highly targeted ad + route + service. That sound perfect for google+UBER. Like a huge market they're positioned perfectly for.
[1]Previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7391885