Gawd, what a silly, silly car. Google is going to make 100 of these? max speed of 25 mph? Why, worried about crashing? I've got news for you, but half of all accidents are the other guy's fault. How will this "car" fare when a Suburban t-bones it in an intersection? The on board computer will recognize the incoming missile and have just enough time to log "oh ****".
And then there is the ugly and impractical LIDAR spinning on top. The main reason why Elon didn't partner with Google on driverless cars is Google's reliance on LIDAR.
While I applaud Google for hiring the Stanford research team that made the first successful driverless car prototype, they have completely screwed up the commercial implementation of it. No one will want to be seen dead in this toy car. Google's effort continues to be run as a research effort, and scholarly research papers are the only thing that will come of it.
Elon's parallel effort may or may not succeed, but if it does, you can bet that the driverless car he produces will be something that people want to buy.
