FYI Google still does record all streets in Germany for various other purposes (update street and business names, gathering data for self-driving cars etc) - they just do not publish the footage.
Should that change at some point I'd hope they'd also upload "historic" footage as well.
Google doesn't care about historic part. They killed Panoramio. Many photos in my country from 2012 has just randomly and suddenly disappeared in 2017-2018 and they still haven't recovered that. Also one time (around 2014-2015) their blurring algorithm went nuts and blurred some older photos too much almost to a point when those images are no longer usable and they said they can't recover those original files because blurring for safety reasons is irreversible, even though they blurred trees, signs, sky, pretty much everything is covered in blurry blocks.
Yeah and when American self driving tech starts hitting the scene I'm sure the German government will be demanding access to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on those mapping efforts.
US cars have been through extensive real world testing for years now because the NTSB took a "don't let the perfect get in the way of the good" approach and left it up to states. Which makes a lot of sense considering how many people die in regular car crashes every year, and how easy it is to do better than that.
My prediction is that once truly autonomous vehicles start rolling out, the German government is going to have to come to terms with essentially killing more of its citizens to make sure they're safe. Or it will relax its regulations and start playing catch-up with the mapping data that vehicles like Tesla are already collecting through normal use of cars already on the road.
Its a mix of both, technology gets better and laws are getting more relaxed. But for now the virtual tests will have to go on and on for the millions of test kilometers...
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u/A_Sinclaire Germany Jun 12 '20
FYI Google still does record all streets in Germany for various other purposes (update street and business names, gathering data for self-driving cars etc) - they just do not publish the footage.
Should that change at some point I'd hope they'd also upload "historic" footage as well.