Mike, thank you so much for joining us here at CES at this
lovely Vegas morning.
How are you doing?
It's great to be here, Augustine.
Very good,
thank you very much.
It's been a really fun-filled
three days.
Awesome.
I feel like if we take a look at the show, EVs really taking a
backseat this year, but there's a lot of talk about autonomous,
about ADAS, and, of course, mapping plays a key role in that.
So what's kind of your observation from the first few
days here?
Yeah, the the two things we're really seeing coming out at CES
this time are really it's AI--AI is everywhere.
And the second is, really, talking about the future of the
perception systems, which is ADAS. And we're seeing a really
big shift right now where, you know, five years ago the
perception stack guys, the mobilize, et cetera of the world
were saying that maps are no longer going to be needed in
the vehicle.
And the shift that we're seeing now is that they're realizing
that you need both the map and the perception stack to work
together to be able to provide the best experience into the cockpit.
So a lot of people are talking about that. Being a mapping
company, it really has been fantastic for us, and we're working with some
of the biggest players to create those ADAS systems that combine
both the map and the perception stack to really provide that
in-cockpit view.
Yeah, and I saw there's actually been a lot of announcements from
you this week.
I feel like there's a daily news release, some some big
partnerships on the way.
Maybe you want to share a little bit more about that?
Yeah, we had a fun time last year.
We had, I think, like 20 announcements, and I said we
need smaller, less announcements, but bigger.
And we did have a very big announcement around our
partnership with AWS.
It's a 10-year partnership, over a billion dollars.
And what we're really focused on is using AWS tooling to be able
to advance our map making.
Map making has changed quite a bit in the last couple years.
It used to be everyone remembers the cars that you drive around
with the big towers on top.
You'd get the, you know, the feed from that,
it would take three months to process.
Now maps are actually made with vehicle perception data, with
satellite imagery, with probe data, et cetera.
And that's being processed, so it's very heavy on the compute side.
And this partnership with AWS is going to help us be able to
bring higher quality, more coverage to different parts of
the world, as well as freshness. And freshness,
what we mean by freshness, instead of that three-month gap,
we're going to be able to make changes in the map within 24 hours.
Oh, wow.
So it's really exciting.
So if there is an intersection that has a stoplight, and they
change it to a roundabout, we'll have that in within 24 hours.
And so the era of the live map is finally here.
How soon can consumers see this in their own vehicle?
Yeah.
So that's the one we're really working on with the OEMs
because, you know, the big challenge is most of the Western
OEMs, their programs take four to five years to get to market.
So by the time you get your vehicle, what's in there is
already old and a lot of pressure from automakers in
China.
And we're seeing a lot of that here at CES.
They take about two years to get to market.
So this live map product will be available in 2025, and we're
working with the OEMs to get that in there as quick as possible.
So I actually believe it'll probably be '26 by the time that
we're seeing this live map, these ADAS maps in the vehicle.
So probably 18 months is what I would say.
That's exciting.
Let's check in next CES.
Thanks so much for joining.
Thank you.