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Map wars heat up between automakers, tech companies
By Matt O’Brien
San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News • Monday August 17, 2015 1:12 AM
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BERKELEY, Calif. — Somewhere lies a mythical city where the cars drive themselves, and the people walk around with wearable guides that know what they want and where to find it. To make this city work requires the most detailed map ever created.
Google wants that map. So do Apple and Uber. And a consortium of German luxury automakers just bought its way into Silicon Valley’s simmering map-making race, announcing this month it will spend $3.1 billion to acquire Nokia’s mapping division, dubbed “Here.”
“They know this is going to be the brains of our cars,” said Eric Gundersen, CEO of the San Francisco startup Mapbox, one of many companies riding a wave of market interest in next-generation cartography. “Mapping is core to everything mobile and everything about being able to move around a city.”
Whichever company can draw the best digital atlas, update it at lightning speed and control who can use it has an edge on future industries from robot taxi and package-delivery fleets to personalized shopping apps.
By taking over Nokia’s 6,000-person maps team, the German trio showed that it won’t let Google, the leader in digital maps, or Apple, which is trying to catch up, control the destiny of location-based technology.
Mapping innovation is no longer just about designing the best turn-by-turn navigation software or the most-beautiful consumer interface. Some maps will become so integrated into smartphone apps that they will know when and where a user might want to shop or eat, Gundersen said.
Engineers who are tracing the world’s urban contours with greater detail than ever are also creating the foundation for vehicle-to-vehicle communications that warn of hazards and traffic congestion, and “smart cities” where every bus line and taxicab is connected to an efficient, pulsating municipal control room.
“The trend is being able to optimize every mile,” said Shiva Shivakumar, a former Google executive who co-founded Urban Engines, which contracts with cities such as Singapore and Sao Paulo, Brazil, to track buses and other public-transit vehicles.
Nokia’s map system already powers about 80 percent of vehicles with embedded navigation in North America and Europe.
“High-precision digital maps are a crucial component of the mobility of the future,” said Dieter Zetsche, chairman of Daimler AG, in a statement about the Nokia deal. “With the joint acquisition of Here, we want to secure the independence of this central service for all vehicle manufacturers, suppliers and customers in other industries.”
Like Google, Nokia has been managing a global fleet of vehicles that capture highly detailed street-level images from Bangkok to Brazil.
Atop each mapping car is a 5-foot rig with accelerometers and gyroscopes that record hills and turns; a panoramic camera that captures images; a global-positioning system tracking satellite-based coordinates; and a fast-rotating laser scanner that can pinpoint the edges of lanes, curbs and tree branches.
On a recent visit to his Berkeley, Calif., office, John Ristevski, Nokia’s head of reality capture and processing, showed how the vehicles mapped San Francisco’s famous Lombard Street to capture its curvy topography in minute detail.
Such precision mapping is a building block for driver-assistance products and especially for fully autonomous vehicles, which will use the internal mapping software to know where to drive.
Hoping to fend off Google before it controls the market, the German automakers are making a long-term investment in autonomous driving, said Marc Prioleau, whose consulting firm specializes in location services.
“You have to invest a lot of money in very expensive sensors and cars and tools to build the maps, and right now, there’s no market for it. It’s a 2020 market,” Prioleau said. “It’s a market that takes a lot of investment today for something out in the future. I think that’s something they want to make sure they controlled.”
Other companies also are in the race. Dutch mapping company TomTom, known for its in-car navigation devices, has partnered with Germany’s Bosch to map freeways for self-driving vehicles; its first project was Silicon Valley’s I-280.