The future is clear! Google will provide you with a self driving car free of charge! The only issue will be that when you tell it you want to go to Safeway it will instead take you to a promoted supermarket, or if you want to see a movie it will take you to a theatre 25 miles away because that theatre bought Google CarWords on the advertising network. They work like AdWords but you get to bid on whether or not the car will bring them to your business when the customer asks to be driven to a business in your category.
That's not the way Google works at all. The entire basis of Google's offerings is that they want to give you the most relevant search results possible, along with relevant ads. If they cease giving you the best search results possible, they know that it opens them up to competitor providing a better product.
The far more likely scenario is that the car will direct you to the nearest supermarket, but also recommend a couple of shops nearby or on the way that it thinks you might be interested in. If they direct you to a "theater 25 miles away", then they know full well that someone else will come in and provide a better search product - in the long term they lose.
There may be privacy issues with Google, there may be issues with the prominence of ads, but claims that they don't provide good search results are completely missing the point.
Funny story, went to the Los Altos Art & Wine festival which had a free shuttle provided by a bus/limo service. The shuttle was a limo-type bus (held about 15 people in its config, as an actual bus it would have held 25) and was taking a really circuitous route to get from the high school to the festival and back. My wife and who road it one direction, and out walked it the other direction, realized that it was using this as a big advertising opportunity not actually trying to shuttle people. If you road the bus you got to see what a party bus was like on the inside, as you drive by people they get exposure to all the ads on the outside of the bus, and inside of course there were brochures if you wanted to rent them for your event. It was "free" but didn't do a very good job of being a "shuttle" (in terms of moving a meaningful quantity of people from remote parking to the festival)
