“The Car Can Drop You At The Front Door To The Building You Work At And Then It Goes And Parks Itself”

From Miguel Helft’s new Fortune interview with Google CEO Larry Page, an exchange about self-driving cars:

“Fortune:

When you’re thinking about the next bet you’re going to make, how do you pick?

Larry Page:

That’s something we’ve been thinking about a lot. Unfortunately, there’s not a perfect science to that. Partly I feel that Google is in uncharted territory in the sense that I don’t think there’s an example from history I can take and say: “Why don’t we just do that?” We’re at a pretty big scale. We’re doing a lot of different things. We want to be a different kind of company. We’d like to have more of a social component in what we do. We like people to be happy with the products they’re using. We like our employees to be happy about working here.

Sorry, back to your main question: Choosing what to do. We want to do things that will motivate the most amazing people in the world to want to work on them. You look at self-driving cars. You know a lot of people die, and there’s a lot of wasted labor. The better transportation you have, the more choice in jobs. And that’s social good. That’s probably an economic good. I like it when we’re picking problems like that: big things where technology can have a really big impact. And we’re pretty sure we can do it. And whatever the technology investment we need to do that, it’s not going to be that huge compared to the payoff.

Fortune:

What else would change [in a world with self-driving cars]? Would we not have streetlights? Would the cities be different? Do you have a vision for what could happen?

Larry Page:

It’s very hard to predict entirely. I think that, you know, one of the issues we face here is parking. I’m getting quotes [for] the cost for us to build a parking lot structure [of] $40,000 per space. It’s all concrete and steel. Do you really want to use all your concrete and steel to build parking lots? It seems pretty stupid. If we have automated cars, or even if we have some fraction of automated cars, we’ll save hundreds of millions of dollars on parking, just at Google. When you think about your experience, the car can drop you at the front door to the building you work at and then it goes and parks itself. Whenever you need it, your phone notices that you’re walking out of the building, and your car’s there immediately by the time you get downstairs.”

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