Getting
you to take your eyes off the road could be worth billions in new search
revenue to Google.
Google
has never said exactly how it will make money off the self-driving vehicles it
has been developing. Will it manufacture cars? Try to become the operating
system for our highways?
The
patent, titled “User interface for displaying internal state of autonomous
driving system,” covers the idea of a vehicle dashboard that uses lights to cue
a driver when it’s safe to relinquish control of their vehicle to a computer.
The
patent includes an extremely telling schematic (shown below) of a driver behind
the wheel of a self-driving car. Because what will people do when the car is
driving? Obviously, they’re going to play with their iPhones.
While
Google has never said how it plans to commercialize automated vehicles, it’s
clear that keeping people’s eyes on the Web instead of on the road could itself
mean a substantial boost to the company’s revenues.
Baloney,
you say. Well, getting people to use Google services instead of doing something
else is already a key strategy of Google’s. That is one reason the company can
afford to maintain its free Android operating system for smartphones. All those
phones mean more people on the Internet, searching via Google, and clicking on
ads.
So
just how much could Google earn by making sure drivers are not distracted from
the Internet?
Based
on U.S. Census Data there are 250 million adults in the U.S., of which 119
million work. Of those, 76 percent drive to work alone spending about 25
minutes to get there. Round trip, call it an hour. Times 260 workdays per year.
That comes to about 23,514,400,000 extra person-hours a year to play with
phones out of about 1,460,000,000,000 hours American adults spend awake each
year. Or about 1.6% more free time overall.
Given
Google’s revenue of $46 billion a year (and assuming the rest of the world
behaves like Americans) the calculation suggests that by freeing up commuters
to surf the Internet driverless cars are worth an additional $736 million in
search revenue to Google.
Oh,
and let’s not forget the point of this patent: Google’s car will tell you when
it’s safe to start searching.
