Toyota’s Plan for Mapping the World

Toyota is taking a page out of the Waze playbook.

Using “designated user vehicles”, USA Today reports that Toyota will send camera and geolocation data from customers cars back to Toyota’s servers, allowing Toyota to map the world.

This is an interesting strategy, and suggests a reason that cars will go from being a relatively fragmented industry, to a relatively consolidated, network-effects-driven industry.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on January 3, 2016.