My wife sees a neurosurgeon who's an eight hour round trip away. I've driven her there and back at least six times this year.
With a Google car, I'd a) be able to send her by herself and b) even if I had to come, I could work on the way, meaning I'd have more than a week's worth of vacation/sick time restored.
You could also hire a limo. I suppose in the future you'll be able to rent a google car for a day, but you don't have to wait for self-driving cars. They're here today, the self just happens to be a human.
I think $10,000 is a big over-estimate, but even that would be spread out over the life of the car. I'd happily pay $1000 a year to not have to worry about driving.
Hopefully I'll be wearing my google glass too! So, I guess so.
True privacy is very hard. You could set up a camera to read plates at some choice points and know the whereabouts of most of the people in your city. If you want to do something privately you have to act deliberately in this day and age.
To set up such cameras, you'd need permission from our National Data Protection Commission and if you were to store footage with car plates you'd fall under the Personal Data Protection Law which requires you to either get explicit consent or fall under one of the few exceptions in the law (and no, tracking random people isn't one of them).
And even if you qualify, you can only use that data for the specific purpose you said you needed it for and it needs to be well protected (for example, a governmental CCTV installation was suspended because the recording weren't being well encrypted).
