Google has been developing a self-driving car.

It’s abnormal for a company to go completely outside of its comfort zone when designing new products, so why would Google go into the automotive control system industry? They claim it’s to improve safety. They’ve also offered the pragmatic assertion that “people just want it”.

Google is a web company. It makes huge gobs of money from advertising, and advertising scales with web traffic. Google’s designing a self-driving car so that drivers can spend their commute time surfing the web on mobile devices. That’s the only explanation that makes sense.

Not that I mind, of course… I’d love to be able to read on the way to work. When can I buy my self-driving car? Can I get one that’s subsidized by ads?