When the artists formerly known as Google want to sell you on something, they come over all hippy, dippy, happy, and clappy. After all, you're essentially a child that needs to be told how to think and live. Transportation is about to get a technology-driven reboot. The details are still taking shape, but future transport systems will certainly be connected, data-driven and highly automated. So to celebrate its Waymo self-driving arm grabbing $2.25 billion of external funding -- what? self-driving isn't self-financing?

Self-driving cars have barely hit the road -- and aren't even close to being pitched to consumers yet -- but heavy traffic already appears to be forming. Web cartoonist Matthew Inman loves his Tesla. But like many proud EV owners and proponents, does he even realize his "Magical Space Car" runs on fossil fuels? Following up tech giants like Google and Uber as well as automotive wunderkind Tesla, car industry stalwart Ford is moving full steam ahead with an autonomous vehicle of its own. Announced amid the Michigan-based corporation's fifth annual trend conference "Further with Ford" in Silicon Valley this week, the car maker revealed it is moving its autonomous driving technology research plans upward to a full-scale advanced engineering program.

Civil Maps' uses AI and sensor data to create maps for autonomous vehicles. Ford is expanding its involvement in self-driving car technology by joining a $6.6m funding round for 3D map-maker Civil Maps. The seed round was led by Motus Ventures, which was joined by Ford, Wicklow Capital, StartX Stanford, and Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang's AME Cloud Ventures. Mapping technology is seen as a key piece in the autonomous vehicle race, as German auto-makers' acquisition of Here maps from Nokia last year illustrated. Civil Maps, which uses spatial data to create "extremely accurate localization", claims its technology is better suited to autonomous vehicles and mobile networks than existing mapping technologies.