Street View, the service integrated into Google Maps to provide users with street-level imagery from nearly all over the world, is growing at a fantastic pace. In 2019, the search giant shared figures revealing that Google Street View cars, equipped with an army of high-resolution cameras used to take 360-degree shots, captured 10 million miles of street-level imagery.
Now that we’ve established how much time these cars spend on the road, you probably know that spotting Google’s cars on the road is not uncommon. Someone in Greece recently came across a Street View car, and to everybody’s surprise, they discovered something you wouldn’t otherwise expect from a tech giant like Google.
The Opel Astra used for capturing Street View imagery did not have insurance despite driving on public roads. An online verification tool published on the government’s website allows anyone in Greece to check whether a car is insured, and it reportedly revealed that the vehicle tasked with capturing Street View data was driving on public roads in Thessaloniki without insurance.
Uninsured cars have become a major concern in Greece, with over 500,000 vehicles on the road estimated to drive on public roads without mandatory insurance. Furthermore, it’s believed that a significant part of these vehicles didn’t pass the mandatory inspection, albeit the numbers are unclear because the government doesn’t have the actual figures.
Local lawmakers have proposed multiple bills, including one that would create a digital database and automatic verification system for insurance and inspection, but the regulations are yet to be adopted.
One essential tidbit that must be mentioned here is that the vehicles used by Google to capture Street View data don’t always belong to the company. These vehicles are sometimes operated by contractors (who are obviously responsible for what they do on the road, inspection, and insurance), but Google also occasionally hires drivers when it starts scanning a new region. Anyone can contribute to Street View imagery with a temporary camera mount installed in a backpack, but everybody is eventually trained to take high-quality imagery and upload it to Google for processing.
Meanwhile, Google’s street-level imagery has become even more important for the search giant, as it helps build a feature called Immersive View. The innovative technology combines street imagery, aerial shots, traffic data, and weather forecasts to create a multi-dimensional view, allowing users to explore certain regions as if they are there. However, Immersive View involves tremendous work and heavy processing, so the feature remains available in limited areas, with Google promising to bring it to more users in the coming years.