Larry Page and Sergey Brin - About self driving cars

Let me go back to Google. We talked a little bit about self-driving cars. How large a change do you think that can cause to happen in society? Either one of you speculate on how large a change that might mean. It's more than just the software. Yeah, I mean, I hope it can be a really dramatic change. I mean, off the bat, of course, there's many people who currently cannot get around. If they're too old, too young, disabled, and so forth. But that's still just a fraction of the population. I think the bigger changes can come to the community, the lifestyle, the land use. I mean, so much of our land in most cities, about 30% to 50% is parking, which is a tremendous waste. And also the roads themselves, which are both congested and take a lot of space, and they're just unpleasant. So with self-driving cars, you don't really need much in the way of parking, because you only need, you don't need one car per person. They just come and get you when you need them. And you can also make much more efficient road use if you, and this is not something we've developed yet, but it's certainly been simulated by many. They can form trains, they can go at high speeds, perhaps much higher than our highway speeds here. Fundamentally, they can just make much more efficient use of the space, and therefore people's time. So I think that can be really transformative. Yeah. Real quickly, and I love the car, because it's such a radical transformation in economics. The way I look at it, a car's $300 a month to lease, a driver's $300 a day. A driverless car is 97% cost reduction in the cost of a driven car. Making it cheaper than a car you own, probably. So it completely changes economics. But the traditional auto companies aren't going to want a large reduction in the number of cars. It depends if they have a five year view or a 20 year view. Well, it also depends if they're the ones producing them. I mean, yes, any individual company might be happy as long as they're the ones making those cars. So do you think Google gets into the business of making cars, potentially? Not that I'm asking you to announce what you're doing, but speculate 10 years from now. Well, I'm very excited about the technology that we're building, but it's still in its early stages. I think eventually, in the future, there might be multiple partners or companies that we work with. Some of them can be manufacturers, and some might be service providers. This is all pretty speculative right now. I'm working hard to just get the basics of the technology working. But the ideal self-driven car is not one that's, you know, we've experimented where we convert the Lexus's and the Prius's. But it's also really nice to not have a steering wheel, not have pedals. Maybe the seats should face each other, things like that. I'm not sure that the traditional car designs are ideal for self-driving. Let me go back.