14 DAY TRIAL // If you're having car problems, I feel bad for you, son/ I got 99 problems but my car ain't one, to paraphrase one of Jay-Z's hits. Google is having car problems right now. Big ones, at that, as well. It looks like the Europe conquest that the Street View is gearing up for is a little more delicate than those of Australia and America.
The Google.org idea and the motto of the Mountain View based company (Ye shall do no Evil or something like it) compel it to use more ecological cars, but so far they went for the Chevrolet Cobalt in the US and the Saturn Astra in Australia. Sergey Brin wants to mend that and wants all the Street View cars to be Toyota Prius, a hybrid car to highlight his company's Green policy.
All he has to do now is fight against the design of the car, proven very unfeasible for mounting the bulky and heavy cameras required for the job, as Valleywag reports. In the meanwhile, drivers are being hired all throughout Europe to drive the cars that will be provided to them. Looking back to an interview (more like a chat, really) with a driver of an Astra, the gadgets' chauffeurs are being instructed in a mob-like manner: "You get the car from point A and drive it to point B. You do not look behind and you wil not get pulled over for any reason. I have confidence in your abilities to get the job done, or somebody's going to get hurt."
I might have added the last sentences myself, but the highlight was that the drivers aren't trained to work the 'heavy machinery' involved with the actual capturing of images.
To summarize it in short, right now there are 300 people waiting on Sergey Brin's indecision. That's power, we should go closer and kiss his strangely shaped ring.