Currently all of the Google Maps data for the US (and increasingly, other parts of the globe) is generated in-house by the street view cars - they don't just ge

Currently all of the Google Maps data for the US (and increasingly, other parts of the globe) is generated in-house by the street view cars - they don't just generate the data for street view, they also generate most of the data for the actual road layout of the maps now, too. If the cars drove themselves, instead of Google having to pay actual people to drive around every single road on the planet all the time, that would be a pretty huge cost saving, I would imagine.