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Take a look at the link displayed. There is proof that Gen 4 was introduced in 2016, and there should be evidence that these vehicles have captured imagery even though they have not been processed through the API.

You may also want to take a look at this similarly-designed Gen 4 vehicle: https://goo.gl/maps/1GNuWE5vQtMLhnAH7

Thanks for the reply.

We understand that you want to have more Gen4 imagery added in our data. Upon further checking internally, the Street View data we currently have is the best that we can offer.

Well, then, in any case if I’m correct the additional data might have still been in the pending queue for many years since the imagery was captured. So, I don’t know if it’ll be published later this year, or if it is just going to be preserved long term.

As new content became available, I've been constantly checking the Bay Area for Gen 4 imagery circa 2016, but honestly, I'm unsure how much longer this is going to take because even though they have been captured it's uncertain how the big G would ever plan to roll out the data.

I created a forum post based on this issue: https://support.google.com/maps/thread/146520554/street-view-gen-4-imagery-circa-2016?hl=en

Okay, I've heard back from a user on that thread saying these vehicles were part of a beta test that led up to its official use the following year. And since it's believed that the data from these vehicles was uploaded to an internal testing server, it is hard to tell whether or not the big G would want to consider after a while transferring the data over to the public API's datasets, possibly in a future Street View update. But we'll wait and see.

This issue will never be tracked if there are no confirmed user experiences. 2016 imagery cannot be completed without Gen 4 captures from that year.

To be honest, the removal of these images from early- to mid-2017 potentially destroys the image quality of (especially rural) roads needing high- or higher-resolution imagery. If the reason was due to a threshold change, they should've thought about those poor images. I feel bad for that. :'(

Great, all the early Gen 4 images in Mountain View have been completely removed. I personally feel uncomfortable about this, so if the images are not restored anytime by May, they'll fall into a curse.

This request needs to be reopened because the March 1 update completely removed the Gen 4 data from 2017, and this is not fair.

With the data completely gone, I honestly feel very uncomfortable looking at Street View. Until Google does something about this, I'll be going into a pause.