Here was bought in 2015 by a consortium that included Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz for €2.8 billion (£2.5bn at today’s exchange rate) and is arguably the leader in automotive location technology. But as money continues to pour into technology to enable hands-free driving, the leader is under threat. Geo CEO Behrens was poached by Google from Here, where he was chief production officer.
Overbeek was outwardly unconcerned with the arrival of Google in its territory, however. “Google has now access to Volvo, and I don’t want to downplay that, but it’s a little bit different. We have 35 million cars providing us sensor data,” he said.
Not all of that is high-definition. To hoover up that data, you need a 3D lidar sensor, Overbeek said, such as that fitted to the EX90.
Autonomous driving is changing the mapping business, however. The biggest players now want to provide location and mapping knowledge as part of a wider ‘stack’ complete with perception sensing and driving policy (a set of rules). For example, autonomous-angled chip-maker Nvidia bought out mapping start-up Deepmap, while lidar maker Luminar announced in January that it had bought lidar-data company Civil Maps.
The tech company with perhaps the biggest bragging rights to its mapping knowledge is Intel-owned Mobileye, the chip and sensor-based autonomous specialist looking to sell a complete autonomous package to car makers.
The Israeli company now reckons it has harvested 12 billion miles of “crowd-sourced” mapping from cars equipped with its EyeQ chip and forward-facing camera. In fact, 8.6 billion of those miles came in 2022, its CEO, Amnon Shashua, told a conference at CES. The car isn’t sending whole images to the Mobileye cloud but instead “sparse” data, indicating landmarks and lane markings, he said.
