Andy Rubin wants to give you a free dashcam, in exchange for the data

While Andy Rubin is probably best known for his involvement as one of Android’s founders, his ambitions certainly don’t end there. After leaving Google in 2014, Rubin has been involved with a number of projects, including creating his own tech incubator called Playground Global. Rubin has also invested in a number of companies such as CastAR, and is rumored to be working on a return to the mobile game. And now Rubin seems to have his sights set on creating a massive real-time visual map of the world, using dashcams.

In an interview with Wired, Rubin talked a bit about his latest project and how he would like to give away a specialized dashcam to those who signed up to work with his program, and in exchange they would give him the data collected from it. This data would be used to create a map of traffic areas in real-time, allowing drivers to potentially get a much more realistic look at traffic conditions before they headed into these congested areas.

The idea of a service that gives you real-time street views and traffic views sound pretty cool we have to admit, but Rubin doesn’t talk at all about the obstacles that would be involved.

First, there’s the cost of free dashcams. Rubin isn’t exactly the richest man in the world, and so he’d need some pretty big partners to pull off the financials needed. Also, they’d need to convince enough people to use dashcams in order to make the information collected truly useful. More than likely that would mean demoing the program in a select city/region and slowly rolling it out to other areas. Lastly, if the idea is real-time traffic analysis, these dashcams would have to access a mobile network, and that’s a whole other cost to consider.

Barring these potential obstacles, would you be interested in a free dashcam if Rubin was offering? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.