Self-Driving Cars Need Good Maps

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Last week, writing about Arizona's early and perhaps reckless embrace of driverless car companies, I wondered about the consequences of the awkward courtship between cities and companies who need to test their technologies in real-world environments. It seemed like the first-mover advantage was bound to accrue to the company, not the place. A fraught trial period would yield a developed, highly mobile technology that could be quickly exported to any other American city. One obvious obstacle to this hypothesis is weather.