No one wants to let Google win the war for maps all over again
Companies tussle for a prize that could be worth billions
SAN FRANCISCO — On any given day, there could be a half dozen autonomous cars mapping the same street corner in Silicon Valley.
These cars, each from a different company, are all doing the same thing: Building high-definition street maps, which may eventually serve as an on-board navigation guide for driverless vehicles.
These companies converge where the law and weather are welcoming — or where they can get the most attention.
For example, a flock of mapping vehicles congregates every year in the vicinity of the CES technology trade show, a hot spot for self-driving feats.
“There probably have been 50 companies that mapped Las Vegas simply to do a CES drive,” said Chris McNally, an analyst with Evercore ISI. “It’s such a waste of resources.”
Autonomous cars require powerful sensors to see and advanced software to think. They especially need up-to-the-minute maps of every conceivable roadway to move.
Whoever owns the most detailed and expansive version of these maps that vehicles read will own an asset that could be worth billions.
Which is how you get an all-out mapping war, with dozens of contenders entering into a dizzying array of alliances and burning tens of millions of investment dollars in pursuit of a massive payoff that could be years away.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google emerged years ago as the winner in consumer digital maps, which human drivers use to evade rushGoogle’s hour traffic or find a restaurant.
Google won by blanketing the globe with its street-mapping cars and with software expertise that couldn’t be matched by navigation companies, automakers and even Apple.
Nobody wants to let Google win again.
The companies working on maps for autonomous vehicles are taking two different approaches.
One aims to create complete high-definition maps that will let the driverless cars of the future navigate all on their own. Another creates maps piece-by-piece, using sensors in today’s vehicles that will allow cars to gradually automate more and more parts of driving.
Alphabet is trying both approaches. A team inside Google is working on a 3-D mapping project that it may license to automakers, according to four people familiar with its plans, which have not previously been reported.
This mapping service is different than the high-definition maps that Waymo, another Alphabet unit, is creating for its autonomous vehicles.
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, that 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 has named three partners for that system to date, but other automakers are reluctant to hand their dashboards over to the search giant.
So 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—in-
cluding General Motors, Uber Technologies and Ford — are all sending out their own fleets to create rich, detailed HD maps for use in driverless cars.
There are also smaller startups hawking gadgets or specialized software to build these maps for automakers that find themselves farther behind.
Still other suppliers are working on mapping services for conventional cars with limited robotic features, such as adaptive cruise control or night vision.
These self-driving maps are far more demanding than older digital ones, prompting huge investments across Detroit, Silicon Valley and China.
“An autonomous vehicle wants that to be as precise, accurate and up-to-date as possible,” said Bryan Salesky, who leads Argo AI, a year-old startup backed by a $1 billion investment by Ford. The “off-the-shelf solution doesn't quite exist.”
Making a driverless map, like making a driverless car, is a laborious task.
Fleets of autonomous test cars, loaded with expensive lidar sensors and cameras, go out into the world with human backup drivers and capture their surroundings.
Plotting the results helps train the next fleet, which will still have safety drivers at the wheel — and, in some cases, scores of additional humans sitting behind computer monitors to catalogue all the footage.
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 almost-constant updates.
The slightest variation on the road — a construction zone that pops up overnight, or a bit of debris — could stop a driverless car in its tracks.
“It’s the freak thing that happens that’s going to make autonomous not work,” said McNally, the analyst.
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.
Every self-driving map looks different because each one depends on the sensor system of the vehicle that creates it.
And there isn't a standard sensor package, said Spark Capital’s Nabeel Hyatt, an early investor in Cruise Automation, the autonomous-driving company bought by General Motors in 2016 for $581 million.
As a result, a slew of HD mapping companies are taking different stabs at the problem, each gobbling up venture capital and competing for lucrative contracts.
Thanks to its years of effort and artificial intelligence arsenal, Waymo is considered the leader in HD maps.
But to date, the company has pitched its entire suite to prospective partners and landed few.
Another potential force in this market is Uber. The ride-hailing giant is also working on HD maps for its driverless program, using test vehicles in a similar way to Waymo.
Lisa Weitekamp, an Uber manager, said the private company is exploring ways to place mapgenerating sensors inside the millions of human-driven vehicles in its service.
The maps those cars already use — the “static” navigation software in the app that takes in popular routes and driving decisions — helps inform Uber’s driverless maps, Weitekamp added. “It gives us a leg up,” she said.
That would make access to ride-hailing maps a valuable asset. Currently, Uber uses a combination of TomTom, Google and its own data for the maps its drivers and riders see. The contract between Uber and Google is set to expire this year, according to two people familiar with the deal.
Representatives from both companies declined to comment.
Plenty of newcomers are pitching carmakers on the need to catch up with front-runners such as Waymo and Uber.