Question 2: Do automakers become map makers?
Where do the lines get drawn between data owned by vehicle manufacturers versus mapping companies? And where do technology providers such as MobileEye and NVIDIA fit in?
From a strategic standpoint, Autonomous vehicles and HD Maps are complements. Vehicle manufacturers would love nothing more than access to ubiquitous, high quality and cheap maps. They would like a ‘commodity complement’. This tension arises because a non-commodity complement threatens to eat into the profit share of the industry. Chris Dixon has a great discussion on “Commoditize your complement”. Tesla announced that they would make the maps they make from their vehicles available to others.
The key issue is that mapmaking is a capital intensive business. By some estimates, it takes $2B per year or more to run a mapmaking operation?—?which includes 2000+ people in post processing operations, usually in India. This implies that HD Maps are unlikely to be a commodity.
Similarly, mapmakers would love to have access to the data from each car, which provides them ubiquitous data that they would otherwise have to spend (a lot) of money to acquire. It is rumored that the buy-in to join the HERE maps consortium is $500M! But it’s unclear what their insertion point would be. There are already deals between mapmakers and automakers, and there are likely to be more of these.
OpenStreetMaps is a viable open source mapping system, with a rich set of contributors. However, the licensing requirements of OSM require any modifications or changes to be given back to OSM, which is likely to be a hurdle.
Another alternative is that the industry could vertically integrate, with vehicle makers buying mapping companies either directly or as part of consortia. This will likely accelerate, given that there are relatively few map companies. But HD Cartography is a beast with its own challenges, and auto makers have their hands full solving the on-vehicle systems challenge.