Uber Wants to Invest Massively into a Global Mapping Project

American multinational online transportation network company, Uber Technologies, is currently enjoying success in quite a few of the world’s most important cities, including New York City, Singapore, Warsaw, Seoul, and Washington. However, the company’s success relies heavily on Google’s mapping services, and the company wants to achieve complete independence in order to ensure its long-term success. As you can probably imagine, mapping out the entire world is no easy feat, nor does it come cheap. Uber wants to invest no less than $500 million into an ambitious global mapping project, which would allow it to create its own detailed maps of the world.

Detail is incredibly important for Uber, as it could allow the company to benefit from more advanced information such as locations of doors or other potential pickup locations, as well as traffic patterns. Furthermore, Uber has expressed an interest in introducing autonomous vehicles to its fleet, and detailed maps would be incredibly useful for this, if not crucial. The company has hired a few former Google employees, and it even bought mapping companies in order to achieve its goals. When it comes to using autonomous vehicles, though, Google definitely has a head start as far as mapping is concerned, and it looks like Uber has quite a bit of catching up to do. In any case, we can probably expect great things from this firm in the future.