It isn't silly to assume considering that an overwhelming majority of Google's revenue comes directly from advertisements.
As for self driving cars, I can think of a ton of marketing use cases including tracking how often people drive, where they go, how long they stay there, the frequency in which someone goes to a location, what type of features in the car the user takes advantage of...
And that's just from the top of my head in 30 seconds. I'm sure the marketing kids at Google can think of far more ways to milk you.
I suspect that technology giants like Google and Facebook are trying to wean themselves from ad revenue, to become conglomerates like other companies of that size, like GE.
The alternative is massive problems in a few years, when somebody has the guts to kickstart a consumer laptop that comes with adblock preinstalled.
As for self driving cars, I can think of a ton of marketing use cases including tracking how often people drive, where they go, how long they stay there, the frequency in which someone goes to a location, what type of features in the car the user takes advantage of...
And that's just from the top of my head in 30 seconds. I'm sure the marketing kids at Google can think of far more ways to milk you.