The partnership between Mobileye and Volkswagen also sets an industry-wide standard that can be used by other automobile manufacturers to share and benefit from crowdsourced map data, according to Volkswagen.

“The Volkswagen agreement is a turning point. It not only utilizes crowd-sourcing technology to automatically generate high-definition maps and scale them cost-effectively. A much more important aspect is that the agreement provides a framework for industry-wide cooperation between automobile manufacturers to jointly produce the map contents that are needed for autonomous driving,” Professor Amnon Shashua, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Mobileye, said in a news release.