HERE and Mobileye partner to create mapping services that can be used in self-driving cars, which require high-definition mapping data for navigation
Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
By late 2016, HERE's autonomous-driving map ambitions rested on pulling anonymized sensor data from Audi, BMW, and Daimler vehicles, but camera-based perception at scale was not HERE's strength. The Mobileye partnership fills that gap: Mobileye's camera-equipped fleet supplies the road-level detail, HERE's platform turns it into navigable high-definition maps for self-driving cars.
The deal also set the template for how both companies grew afterward — HERE followed it with a telematics partnership with LG aimed at autonomous vehicles, and Mobileye's collection engine scaled to 3.7 million miles of sensor data daily by 2020, feeding HD maps that let its partners ship Level 2+ driver assistance.
First-order effects
- HERE gains a high-volume camera data source beyond its automotive owners' sensor feeds, accelerating its next-generation autonomous-driving maps; Mobileye gets a distribution channel that turns its perception data into a map product rather than a chip-only business.
Second-order effects
- Automakers building self-driving programs can source HD maps from the HERE-Mobileye pairing instead of funding proprietary mapping fleets, pressuring any rival still surveying roads manually to find a crowdsourced data partner of its own.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, HD map production consolidates around shared, crowd-sourced sensor pipelines — as Mobileye's 2020 data volumes show — making live map updates an infrastructure layer that automakers license jointly rather than build alone.
The trend: Autonomous-vehicle mapping is shifting from manually surveyed static maps to partnership-based, crowd-sourced sensor data pipelines that update continuously.