Waymo builds centimeter HD maps for every street it drives. Tesla says “maps are a crutch” — just drive with vision. Who’s right for scaling to 1M cities?
🗺️ HD Maps
Pre-mapped lanes, curbs, signs. Ultra precise. Needs fleet to keep fresh (daily updates). Waymo, Cruise use it.
🧠 Mapless
Drives like a human — perceives lanes on the fly. Tesla FSD, Wayve, Comma.ai. Scales everywhere instantly.
The Hybrid Future
2026 consensus: lightweight prior + real-time perception. Cars carry coarse SD maps + semantic priors, and neural nets infer details live. Crowdsourced mapping (fleet phones) updates priors hourly without $10k mapping cars.