Today’s semi-autonomous driving features are neat, but they only work on highways?and well-marked highways at that. Self-steering systems used by Tesla Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Infiniti, and others rely on painted lane markings, but that won’t be good enough for fully autonomous rides. General Motors has a plan, however, and is working with supplier Mobileye on a mapping project that might offer future self-driving cars a redundant backup to their visual understanding of painted lane markings.
The answer is found in crowd-sourced imaging, which can update a central database on highway markings; autonomous cars can then cross-check what their cameras are seeing against what other cars have “seen.” According to GM, gathering this data is as simple as using Mobileye mapping strategies and applying them to GM vehicles equipped with forward-facing cameras (which many GM cars already have) and a 4G LTE data connection. As the vehicles roam America’s roads, they upload visual lane data to a central database. The database, then, becomes a sort of real-time fact-checking resource for self-driving cars.
Elon, Take the Wheel! We Test Tesla?s New Autopilot Feature
GM Invests $500 Million in Lyft to Create Network of Self-Driving Taxis
Possible GM/Google Hookup on Self-Driving Tech, New Super Cruise Features

This is both clever and important, because today Tesla’s AutoPilot highway self-driving function relies primarily on the car’s visual...