Google Street View trikes are coming…

Those of us in South Africa have recently noticed a couple of these stomping around the neighbourhood:

Google Street View Prius. How very “An Inconvenient Truth” of them.

I know I have. There was one parked in my street a couple of weeks back. Although not exactly THIS one per se:

Even Google gets tickets.

Well, if you were wondering, they’ve been cruising around the roads of SA snapping photos for Google Street View – a street level photo version of Google Maps.

Of course there’s more to a country than just major roads, so now that that’s busily underway…

Street View is a hugely popular feature of Google Maps which is already available in more than 100 metropolitan areas around the world. We launched Street View driving in South Africa on the 1st of September 2009. The launch of the product is expected in 2010. (from Travelwires.com)

…it’s time to get cracking on those places where cars can’t necessarily go.

Enter the Google Street View Trike:

Google Street View trike just chilling, having a brew.

As operated by folks like this Tour de France champ in the making:

Nice helmet.

They will be trundling around snapping away merrily in an effort to cover even more of the place over the next few months.

As discussed in the aforementioned article on Travelwires.com:

We’re giving people a sneak preview of our latest groundbreaking invention – the Google Trike. This mechanical masterpiece comprises 3 bicycle wheels, a mounted Street View camera and a specially decorated box containing image-collecting gadgets. It also comes with a very athletic cyclist in customised Google apparel. The Trikes are not only a low-emission means of collating street-level imagery, as we are currently doing with the Street View Toyota Prius cars, but they also help Google collect imagery in places inaccessible by cars.

We can also reveal that we’re polling the South African public to vote for their special spots, such as historic landmarks and popular tourist destinations that the Trikes might visit. Google has teamed up with South African Tourism, with its unrivalled knowledge of South Africa’s tourist treasures, to compile a list of 20 exciting locations around the country, for which the public can vote and choose the top 3 locations that the Trikes will visit first.

As mentioned in the snippet above, the South African public is being polled for their favourite spots to send the trikes to. Head over to the poll and vote by clicking HERE.

Here’s a clip of the Trike in action: