Everyone's been there: driving in the pitch dark, attempting to decipher signs, handle sharp turns, and weave through multiple lanes of whizzing traffic. It's a difficult situation even for an experienced human driver--so how can a car that's driving itself pull it off? An autonomous vehicle must know its precise location, the location of other cars around it, the route to its destination, and any possible obstacles in its path. To deliver that information, automakers are turning to technology developed by San Francisco-based startup Civil Maps. The 30-employee company says it can give cars data that's more accurate and more frequently updated than competing self-driving systems.

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.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Google's self-driving car right now is that you can't pull up Google Maps, pick a destination and tell the car to go there. That's because to learn new routes, the car has to be "trained" by a human driver at least once or twice first. But now a number of organizations, including Ford Motor Company, Stanford University and an investment firm run by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, have invested 6.6 million into a company that promises to leapfrog that navigation issue by creating cheap, detailed maps that driverless cars will be able to read on the fly. And these maps will be created by regular drivers such as yourself, according to Civil Maps, the company behind the idea. In that respect, the concept is a bit like another Google-owned product, Waze.

The greatest advantage self-driving cars hold over outdated humans is the ability to tune out distractions. No buzzing phone, yelling kids, or lovely daydream will divert attention from their primary task. That doesn't mean they can't get overwhelmed with information in much the same way you do. The fully autonomous vehicles that companies like Google, Ford, and Baidu are furiously developing all rely on light detection and ranging (LIDAR) to see and map the world. Those maps are key, because they provide crucial context for the vehicles and let them focus their sensors and computing power on temporary obstacles like cars, pedestrians, and cyclists.

The greatest advantage self-driving cars hold over outdated humans is the ability to tune out distractions. No buzzing phone, yelling kids, or lovely daydream will divert attention from their primary task. That doesn't mean they can't get overwhelmed with information in much the same way you do. The fully autonomous vehicles that companies like Google, Ford, and Baidu are furiously developing all rely on light detection and ranging (LIDAR) to see and map the world. Those maps are key, because they provide crucial context for the vehicles and let them focus their sensors and computing power on temporary obstacles like cars, pedestrians, and cyclists.