4 ms·

I'm pretty sure map data is expensive and those companies license it.

• crusso 13y ago
  I realize that they license it. I dispute that it's anything but a cash cow for those companies that charge $100-$300 for map updates that many other companies make available for free. I've purchased licenses for multiple software packages and at the scales that these car distributors work at, it's ridiculous to think that their actual gps data costs aren't nominal (ie, pennies) per vehicle.
• maguay 13y ago
  They license it and give it away with several hundred dollar gadgets. Seems surprising that an auto manufacturer wouldn't do the same with their tens-or-hundreds-of-thousand dollars products.
• twistedpair 13y ago
  The long term contracts with M2M interfaces for OTA updates are generally low bandwidth. Carriers are willing to sell these long term contracts because it consumes very little of their network capacity. If you started pushing out constant multi-gig map updates across them, then the price to operate their OTA infrastructure (their vendor) would massively increase. That's the point we're they'd probably have you download the update online and usb stick it to your car, assuming they were willing to eat the cost of new maps licenses.