"Of course, the world is a messy, complicated place, so if you want your self-driving car to be able to handle any road you throw at it, you need to train it with a lot of data. You need to drive it through as many potential situations as possible: gravel roads, narrow alleys, mountain switchbacks, traffic-heavy city expressways. Many, many times. Which brings us to Google Street View. For years now, Google has been sending Street View cars around the world, collecting rich data about streets and the things alongside them. At first, this resulted in Street View imagery. Then it was the underlying street geodata (i.e., the precise longitude/latitude paths of streets), enabling Google to ditch Tele Atlas and make its maps out of data it obtained from Street View vehicles. Now, I’m realizing the biggest Street View data coup of all: those vehicles are gathering the ultimate training set for driverless cars." - × × ×