How Your Next Car Could Help Make Itself Obsolete

Startup Civil Maps has a plan to get human-piloted cars to hasten their own demise. Autonomous vehicles like those being tested by Google, Uber, and major automakers rely on 3-D maps that record the position of curbstones and traffic lights with high accuracy. The maps are usually created by driving around in vehicles outfitted with expensive sensors. Civil Maps wants to use consumer cars as a low-cost mapping workforce instead, taking advantage of the sensors being added to premium models for advanced cruise control and crash avoidance. Those cheaper sensors can't match those in a dedicated mapping vehicle.