Nothing stops them from actually selling their finished automation software.

This seems like the kind of domain where the government can be useful. Negotiate terms to buy the aggregate data off everyone experimenting with self-driving vehicles and make it all publicly available for them all to use. Its a safety issue more than anything else, because we have borderline genocide going on every year with tens of thousands of roadside deaths, making cars safer is not just some side project for profits sake alone.

> This seems like the kind of domain where the government can be useful. Negotiate terms to buy the aggregate data off everyone experimenting with self-driving vehicles and make it all publicly available for them all to us

Why should the tax-payers subsidize private actor's R&D? I'm sure Google is amenable to partnership/sharing their data with anyone for the right amount or under the right terms; free hand of the market and all - no need for government "meddling".

You could claim the data is a public good. If the data is useful for companies beyond Google or Uber, or even other industries, it is plausible that it confers a public benefit, a benefit that (at least theoretically) is not being accounted for when Uber and Google do their calculus about how much to invest in data collection. In that sense, government would be the perfect actor to support -- and perhaps even subsidize -- this data collection in exchange for having it shared with the broader community.

Because then you keep kicking the problem down the road. Groups with cash treasure troves can reap data, and certain actors will never release the data, and in practice you won't see many organizations negotiating such data because it is valuable but its value is highly volatile based on what comes of the R&D. I cannot imagine almost any department willingly just selling it under current conditions, or else they may face the reality they effectively sold the necessary work to get the first fully automated system to market for what becomes pennies on what the reaper of that gold mine receives.

Because this data is a matter of survival, where you can easily forecast at least several million vehicular fatalities in the next decade worldwide, it becomes relevant that the various states (I'm extending this globally since several European car companies are also engaged in automation development) it is paramount it be made accessible in the same way we seem to be finally having the epiphany that should have happened at least two decades ago that scientific research should be made openly available.

> Groups with cash treasure troves can reap data, and certain actors will never release the data, and in practice you won't see many organizations negotiating such data

You make it sound like it is such a travesty or a great injustice, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. Generating this data is not rocket science; it is fairly well-documented, the components are commodities and the process repeatable, one of the big challenges is that it is capital-intensive to scale. If the data is valuable as you postulate, raising the required capital should be easy, capitalism has been solving this problem for centuries.

> Because this data is a matter of survival, where you can easily forecast at least several million vehicular fatalities in the next decade worldwide,

No, it really isn't a matter of survival (at nation-state level you've elevated the discussion to). There are things that kill more people than vehicular accidents, so if your angle is "saving lives", then world governments really need to step-up their health game and meaningfully fight heart disease and cancer; hell, maybe they could even buy all the pharmaceutical research data and open that up to the public while there are at it (good luck getting a good price from GSK, Pfizer et al).

What if they sold the data to Uber? Everyone wins!

Just because Uber starting field trials with passengers first, doesn't mean they are ahead of the game. Google have been doing it for years and you know how good at they are at this. So, Google will not sell the data, rather they will improve their offerings and just partner with car companies.

Well, you will run their software, and they can sell you ads in your car where you have nothing to do but wait.

My take on Google X projects is to do cool things that may find alternate revenue streams to selling ads (or just do cool things, without necessarily having a business plan up front). Sure Google makes most of their money from ads, but they are trying lots of different things to make money elsewhere. Self driving cars, Ara, Google Glass, and others weren't trying to push ads, they were trying to find new products to make money in some other way (maybe).

Google's push to expand their Cloud offering is also showing them trying to pursue non-ad based revenue.

Google knowing where you go could make their models of you more valuable. Now they can specifically target ads based on where you go and when. Sitting in the cab waiting to get where you are going what are you going to do? Pull out your smart phone and see an ad offering a sale at a competitor to where you told the cab to go.

Fuck that, I'll walk. I live a life with the least ads as possible and even then I am smothered by them.

I like open source and open data in principle, but hate how it is driving more of the economy to an ad-supported model.

I don't see the connection. The core code and data of ad-supported companies like Google and Facebook are closed, while the open source companies and projects like Red Hat and OpenStreeMap are not usually ad-supported.

If that's the end game google can license their software to other car vendors. No need to giveaway the data.

And they run MY software, without giving much back.

-- disgruntled open source dev