Payoff could be years away
This mapping service is different than the high-definition maps that Waymo, another Alphabet unit, is creating for its autonomous vehicles.
Google’s mapping project is focused on so-called driver-assistance systems that enable cars to automate some driving features and help them see what’s ahead or around a corner. Google released an early version of this in December, called Vehicle Mapping Service, which incorporates sensor data from cars into their maps.
For now, Google is offering it to carmakers that use Android Automotive, the company’s embedded operating system for cars.
Google is looking to expand the features on the mapping service and find other ways to distribute it, these people said.
“We’ve built a comprehensive map of the world for people and we are working to expand the utility to our maps to cars,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. She declined to comment on future plans.
At the same time, Waymo and the other giants with sizable driverless research arms — including General Motors Co., Uber Technologies Inc. and Ford Motor Co. — are all sending out their own fleets to create rich, detailed HD maps for driverless cars.
There are also smaller startups hawking gadgets or specialized software to build maps for automakers that find themselves further behind.
Making a driverless map, like making a driverless car, is laborious.
Fleets of autonomous test cars, loaded with lidar sensors and cameras, go out into the world with human backup drivers and capture their surroundings. .
It’s an expensive ordeal with a payoff that’s years, if not decades, away. “Even if you could drive your own vehicles around and hit every road in the world, how do you update?” asked Dan Galves, a spokesperson for Mobileye. “You’d have to send these vehicles around again.”
Unlike conventional digital maps, self-driving maps require almostconstant updates.
Mobileye argues that it’s more efficient and cost-effective to let the cars we’re driving today see what’s ahead.
In January, the Intel Corp. unit an- nounced a “low-bandwidth” mapping effort, with its front-facing camera and chip sensor that it plans to place in two million cars this year.
Mobileye says this will take less computing horsepower than building a comprehensive HD map of the roads would; Mobileye’s Galves said the company will pair its sensor data with the maps from navigational companies and, over time, create a map for a fully driverless car.
That’s also the tactic of Google’s longtime mapping foes HERE and TomTom NV. These two European companies have positioned themselves as the primary alternatives to Google Maps, selling the dashboard screen maps to automakers today. Yet these “static” maps see only broad street shapes and capture snapshots in time.
Now both companies are working on replacement products: “dynamic” maps that represent lanes, curbs and everything else on the road.
HERE, owned by a consortium of German automakers, has a few examples on the road. Its mapping system enables limited hands-free driving for Audi AG, one of its co-owners, and plans to support safety features this year for Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, another co-owner.
Tesla Inc. is the car company most eagerly embracing the incremental march toward autonomous driving with its driver-assistance software, Autopilot. Tesla relies on cameras and sensors on its vehicles but has eschewed lidar. The company hasn’t disclosed what mapping service it’s using for Autopilot, and a company representative declined to comment. Tesla had a nasty public split with Mobileye two years ago.
But Tesla has leaned on at least one other company, Mapbox Inc., to help assemble its maps. Mapbox has mostly sold its location data to apps such as Pinterest and Snapchat. Fresh off a $164-million financing round, the startup has started to inch into automotive maps. Through its software installed on phones, Mapbox said it plots some 354 million kilometres of road data globally a day.
And like other companies targeting automakers, Mapbox is happy to play neutral and work with anyone. “We don’t know who is going to win,” Gundersen said.
It’s not just that no one knows who will come out on top. The mapping industry doesn’t even know which strategy is best. A slew of HD mapping companies are taking different stabs at the problem, each gobbling up venture capital and competing for lucrative contracts. Some of them disparage Mobileye’s approach, which relies on a seamless transition from semi-autonomous driving to driving without human assistance. Waymo, formerly known as the Google self-driving project, started on maps in 2009, with Waymo’s Andrew Chatham and one other engineer crafting them from scratch — shipping cars with sensors to capture a city’s surroundings, then coding images into a digital landscape.
Chatham said cars may rely on perceptions systems alone to drive on the highway but would be helpless in other traffic conditions. Imagine pulling up to a busy, double-left-lane intersection you’ve never seen before. Now imagine a self-driving car trying to do that.
“That’s the advantage of having a detailed map,” Chatham said. “We can give the cars all the answers to the nasty questions.”
Another potential force in this market is Uber. The ride-hailing giant is also working on HD maps for its driverless program in a similar way to Waymo.
Lisa Weitekamp, an Uber manager, said the private company is exploring ways to place map-generating sensors inside the millions of human-driven vehicles in its service.
Plenty of newcomers are pitching carmakers on the need to catch up with front-runners such as Waymo and Uber.
DeepMap Inc., started by veterans of Google and Apple, is banking on its intelligent software to cut down the time and cost involved in converting the images pulled from self-driving car sensors into a single, high-resolution landscape. The startup said it’s working with Ford, Honda Motor Co. and China’s SAIC Motor Corp.
Civil Maps has tech that “fingerprints” sensor data, forming digital grids with each loop made by a mapping vehicle around the same area. Ford is an investor and Puttagunta said his company is in the process of raising additional money.
For now, most car companies are testing the waters rather than cutting massive, multimillion-dollar deals for maps.
The new entrants know they can’t all survive. “It’s very similar to navigational maps or even the search engine,” said DeepMap’s Luo, a former Googler. “Whoever has bigger scale will have the advantage.”