from Hacker News

Tesla Owners Can Edit Maps to Improve Summon Routes

by AlexTrask on 11/11/19, 8:39 AM with 34 comments

• by _ph_ on 11/11/19, 10:05 AM

  This is great news. OSM might not have gotten as much public awareness like Wikipedia, but it deserves it. Having a global map data source, which isn't only freely available, but to which everyone can contribute, is a great piece of information infrastructure. The level of map details, especially off the roads open for car traffic, is excellent around the place where I live.

  With Tesla pulling map information used for routing in the summon feature from OSM, this gives not only an overall incentive for Tesla owners to enhance the OSM database, but also gives them the ability to add the data they personally need, making the feature more useful in places which didn't have good data yet.

  I wonder though, if Tesla could use the data collected by the vehicles in general to improve OSM. As Tesla seems to track special driving situations for building and enhancing the Autopilot features, they could also automatically detect wrong or missing map information, whenever a Tesla drives "off" the map. Based on that information, they could contribute to OSM a lot.

• by HNLurker2 on 11/11/19, 11:52 AM

  It's that hard to walk to a car we need to reinvent the wheel? It's getting ridiculous

• by michaelmcmillan on 11/11/19, 9:22 AM

  Uhm, anyone else worried about the security here? What if someone were to draw a “parking lot” polygon that resulted in a path to water?