Have you ever seen the Google Streetview car?

Thanks for posting that! Here's a link to Google Maps Street View:

http://goo.gl/maps/wsARJ

The google map car drove down my street last May while I was mowing. I assumed it was photographing at the time as it was going quite slowly and turning up each side street court. The street view pictures have not shown up on the maps so far tho.

The car I saw did not look like the one in your post. It was painted up a lot more and clearly marked as Google. Also the camera was more ball shaped ... looked more like this one: http://jpgmag.com/news/2011/04/spotted-the-new-google-maps-c...

A lot can happen between March 2009 and April 2011.

and got my picture taken sort of
43.963073,-78.152042

I'm in the white Escape when you pan to the left and look between the street signs.

I followed one over the harbor bridge in Corpus Christi. I let him slowly pass me and pull ahead and stayed within picture range for at least 2 miles, but I don't think I made the cut. I need to go look again.

As I was returning from a shopping trip I saw a weird looking car with a tower on top with a device that looked like a rotating camera.
As I passed it I realized it was a Google Earth car taking photographs of my neighborhood.

Do they actual drive by Google employee or third party contractor? I thought they only use hybrid vehicle for this purpose, would have save them some gas.

Now you can see the grand Canyon view: http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2012/10/trekking-grand-canyon-... ....and their process. One more tool for the trekking lovers.

This you can see better: https://www.google.com/maps?ll=36.065096,-112.137107&spn=0.2...

But that's a part of living and working in Silicon Valley.

Often I catch that sense of motion in my peripheral vision, and turn to see a Google car with the twirly on top of it. You see them on surface streets in the area as well as on the freeways in the area.

You also see different variations on the sensor gear, evidently trying out different approaches.

I've seen the vehicle in town a couple of times, and they were different cars each time.

I wonder what time of day they work because there usually aren't a lot of pedestrians in the Street View pictures. Even when they take pictures at tourist attractions there really aren't that many people - and it seems that faces are obscured.

Here is one of my pics of the Bright Angel Trail
http://i139.photobucket.com/albums/q297/spokybob/IMG_0313d.j...

I've never seen a Google Maps Streetview car.

I've also never seen a coelacanth.

I like the streetviews, but the tinfoil hatter in me fears it as well.

nope

nope

NAVTEQ normally trots one of theirs to major trade shows along with an engineer that can explain how the car is used and all its functions. If you are into electronics and cartography, it is a 30 to 45 minutes well spent. The "sled" on the roof is well over a million dollars worth of electronics, and that doesn't cover the stuff inside which is another $3-400K.

My wife and I were at her parents farm and I was looking out to the road and seen it drive by,then a while later I checked on Google earth and we were both on camera,kind of neat.

The first time they did my neighborhood, it was after dark. Since there are no streetlights, all you could see was the occasional light. They have since redid it. Since they manually censor their pictures, not sure why they ever used the original set.

I was waiting for my car to get serviced. The shop was right next to the freeway offramp. I was watching the cars go by and saw this car get off the freeway. Must not have been recording because I still don't see me in the street view.

Do they actually have to drive around to capture the street view? Why not use drone? I read article on
Time magazine that many people using drone for capture real estate photo/video, hunting animal, surveillance.....

I can tell when they came by my house. It was a Monday morning because our empty trash bin is sitting by the curb.

Maybe it is because Streetview captures the scene from the street. If you wanted a view from the the air you could call it Birdseye view. Or wait, that is what Bing already calls it.

That is a nice photo, for those who can`t not venture that way!
Thanks.

Traffic is bad enough without unmanned drones flying 2-3 metres above street level...

...unless you meant drone cars, in which case Google is already working on that.

I have seen it passing by before. The one situation is with me within our Jeep at our old apartment.

I see the google car.

The Google self driving car currently requires quite elaborate "documentation" of any streets to be driven. (well beyond just pictures) My guess is that you may have been seeing mostly Google cars undertaking that mission. This might help account for your much higher rate of sighting than the rest of us see.

Driving about 6000 miles a year here in New Mexico, mostly within Albuquerque, I believe I saw a Street View car just once.

I've never seen the Street View car at all here in the Washington, DC area.

I spotted the Google StreetView car two summers ago as it drove by me while I was parked in a cul-de-sac.

Checking Google Maps, I see that I now have my 15 minutes of StreetView fame -- http://goo.gl/4Jsvh -- at least until the next update

Caught "on film" loitering in Mississauga. Ouch!

I saw the Google car in December while passing through Southern Oregon. It was heading north on the I-5 freeway. I don't know if it was active or just on it's way to another area.

While using Streetview, I've notice other cars that seem to keep pace with the Streetview car as it rolls down the roadway. I imagine this is partly out of curiosity or the normal flow of traffic; but perhaps also an interest in maximizing their "15 minutes".

It's not much of a problem when it's a small car, but I've seen some big truck trailers that block the side view for quite a while; and that can be a little frustrating when you're trying to get a look at something that's on the other side.

JM

One way to tell if one is active is to notice if the equipment on the roof is "up" or "down." Extended these things are about 15 feet high.

Never, but my brother says he sees it quite often. I guess it depends on where you live.

I did see one in my neighborhood during the summer of 2012 in NW Ohio.
It was white, had some bright graphics/lettering on it and had a red ball on the roof.

Odd looking thing, and it took me a while to realize what it was.

Once

I see those things much more frequently now then ever. I can only imagine how many they have out on the road.

There were a couple of them together.

I've seen it several times in the Philly, PA area, managed to get a photo of it in South Philly one day.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash2/24391...

Never saw the car but the house is there in this rural area so they have been around

I've seen one 3-4 times, even managed to get myself on Streetview.

Living in a rural part of the world (Darke County, OH), I have yet to see a Google Streetview car or even hear of anyone around here seeing one.

To have a job driving one of those around..

The photo I linked above, the truck I was in is on the street view of that spot.

a week you would be totally bored. If they are used for mapping like Navteq's you would drive through an intersection once for each direction of travel and once for each lane. That's 8 times for a junction of 2 2 lane roads just to be certain all the measurements were correct and the intersection was fully captured on video and LIDAR.

Talked to a NAVTEQ engineer at a trade show I did 2 years ago where they had one of their cars. The equipment on the roof raises to between 14 and 16 feet above the road and is worth over 3/4 of a million. The other $250K is in the computer systems and storage units in the back.

I have seen it twice also my wife and i were caught on camera at the in-laws,and in front of my house.

Quite true. When they first started doing this I wondered if they would ever go along side streets where I live.

Just recently I checked and saw my house which is in a small country sub-division.

Nuvi1300WTGPS

I can't address seeing the car, but a quick look in Google Earth shows there to be Streetview coverage on Daly Road between Union City Road and the Greeneville-Nashville Road, pretty much the full street grid in Greeneville, etc.

The pics I happened to look at were pretty high-resolution, so probably taken within not very many years ago.

... saw it a couple times the last time it was in town about eleven months ago ...

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it's the dog's fault

he had the camera covered. I followed him for a while on I-85 through the Raleigh-Durham area a few months back, and managed to get a shot of him.

http://moose135.smugmug.com/PhotoADay/Photo-A-Day-2013/i-HJR...

last summer driving down my street...the street view map for my area just showed up a month or so ago...man, I am glad the grass was cut and the beds mulched

In my travels over the past few years, I've spotted one now and then. They are a little hard to miss with the bright graphics and the ball perched on the roof. I have to assume they congregate at a motel once it starts getting dark but have never seen that. The one's I've seen have always been solo, but in some of their photos when they are in a remote area such as the haul road in Alaska, you can spot a 2nd car as they run in pairs (presumably to cover vehicle and equipment malfunction).

They sometimes merge the photos from different trips. On more than one occasion when I was looking for an address using Street View and was stepping down the street, the photos would alternate between seasons!