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I worked with a major automotive company that was upgrading its head units to be more user friendly. Their #1 customer request at the time was to have it use G
by mdorazio 7y ago
I worked with a major automotive company that was upgrading its head units to be more user friendly. Their #1 customer request at the time was to have it use Google Maps, so they tried to negotiate a discount with Google. I can't share the discount amount, but it was laughably small and the company would have been shelling out millions of dollars a month to Google for the integration. Needless to say, they stuck with a different mapping provider.
- lucb1e 7y agoI was actually kind of surprised that my spouse's new company car did not come with either Google Maps or OpenStreetMap but instead credits the map data to some mapping company from eastern Europe if I remember correctly -- the data looks like whitelabeled TomTom or HERE data. I just wish they would either augment their data with OSM or augment OSM with their data: now, with proprietary data, the data was already old when we got the car, and the fixes I contributed to OSM are obviously not in there. Instead of contracting some middle man for inferior map data, they could have used completely free (as in beer) data for the regions where OSM is more up to date and complete than any commercial provider (empirically, this is most of the land mass on earth plus countries with a lot of mapping enthusiasts and/or free government data, like Germany and the Netherlands).
- mdorazio 7y agoFor what it's worth, traditional (i.e. not Tesla) OEMs generally had a "no open source anything" policy for a long time, for a variety of reasons I don't really agree with. That's changing a little bit these days, but not a whole lot.