The Map Wars · Part 3

At CES 2023, HERE unveiled its next-generation map-making platform, UniMap: automated production, SD, HD and indoor maps unified into a single digital representation, changes publishable within 24 hours. Put its product page next to TomTom's Orbis and you can match them almost line for line.

After forty years of combat, the two companies' technology slides have become interchangeable.

That is not the end of the story; it is where the real story begins. When technology no longer decides the winner, what does? The answer hides in a choice each company made around 2022. But to understand that choice, you have to go back to the genes.

Two Sects

HERE belongs to the sect of field survey. The Navteq bloodline: survey fleets, field offices, a "ground truth" faith in having personally seen every road — the HERE True LiDAR fleet is that tradition's continuation. The trust it sells carmakers is built on a chain of physical verification: behind every data point, someone checked the real world.

TomTom belongs to the sect of probes. The Tele Atlas-plus-PND bloodline: as early as 2008 it built the world's first community-validated map database on twenty million devices — over 50,000 community-verified corrections in a single release, matching all other sources combined — and later grew the probe network to hundreds of millions of devices. Its trust is built on statistics: hundreds of millions of eyes watching the roads on its behalf.

The two philosophies have opposite cost curves. Field survey: high fixed cost, high precision, low freshness. Probes: low marginal cost, high freshness, precision by statistical convergence. Forty years on, each is poaching from the other — HERE chases fleet data feedback for freshness, TomTom builds LiDAR vehicles for precision — but genes decide default behavior: under budget pressure, HERE protects the fleet first; TomTom protects the probes.

A Misaligned Decade

2016 to 2018 was HERE's golden hour. HD Live Map introduced the "self-healing map"; the Open Location Platform aspired to be an exchange for location data; the sensor-data consortium of its three German shareholders handed it a real-time data source no one else had; it donated the SENSORIS standard to the industry. The route's crowning proof: Mercedes' Drive Pilot — among the first certified Level 3 systems anywhere — runs on HERE's HD map. For those few years, HERE was the industry's designated definer of the next-generation map.

TomTom spent the same period doing something unglamorous: demolishing and rebuilding its production line. The new map-making platform, internally codenamed Genesis, took heavy investment from around 2019; in 2020 Uber became a map-editing partner, feeding customer business data back into the line; in 2021 the cutover stumbled — releases slowed, automotive deliveries suffered, the stock took a beating; in 2022 the automation paid off and roughly 500 map-production jobs, a tenth of the workforce, were cut — an ING analyst called it the "holy grail of fully automated map-making" finally reached; that November the new Maps Platform launched, and in 2023 OpenStreetMap data formally entered the map.

The misalignment sits right there: HERE did "map as a service" first, on an old production line; TomTom rebuilt "the line as a factory" first, and its platform came late. HERE's platform vision was five years early and never became an exchange; TomTom's rebuild hurt for two years and genuinely changed the cost structure. A decade on, one had accumulated a narrative; the other had accumulated a factory.

Converging on the Same Destination

Then the opening scene: 2023, UniMap, and HERE too converged on "one map, many views, continuous publication." The two companies had arrived, by opposite roads, at the same technical destination — automation replacing manual editing, a single database deriving every product, updates measured in days rather than quarters.

Headcount curves cross-validate the story. TomTom cut 500 map editors in 2022 and another 300 staff in June 2025 in its AI pivot; HERE has run round after round of restructuring — in its employees' own words, "constant reorgs, management churn, random layoffs." The direction is identical: editing jobs vanish, AI jobs grow. The difference is the narrative — each TomTom cut maps to a production-line milestone; HERE's cuts map to financial pressure. The same act: for one, a byproduct of upgrading the factory; for the other, a tourniquet.

The technology has fully converged. That is the most important signal of all: whatever decides the winner next will not be found in the technology.

The 2022 Question

The fork came over raw materials.

In late 2022, TomTom co-founded Overture and swapped its base map for open data — choosing "open ingredients plus a proprietary factory": donate the base layer to the commons, and pour every euro saved into the dynamic layers — live traffic, lane-level data, charging-station status. That bet is about cost structure: base-map commoditization is irreversible; concede early, save early, migrate value upward.

HERE chose not to move. UniMap remains a fully proprietary vertical stack — its own ingredients, its own line, its own delivery. That bet is about liability structure: automotive customers want an end-to-end chain of responsibility, and carmakers won't touch open data's licensing contamination and liability ambiguity.

Both bets are coherent. But a preliminary verdict is already in: Volkswagen Group's software company CARIAD signed its ADAS-grade map contract with TomTom — the German OEM system personally certifying that open ingredients can clear automotive-grade delivery. The hardest plank in HERE's argument is failing.

The deeper difference lies beneath the moats. HERE's trump card — the shareholder fleet sensor consortium — has a structural flaw: the data moat is welded to the equity; as shareholders drift, the moat leaks. Mercedes piping Google's data into its own navigation is the sound of the leak. TomTom's probes come from customer products and commercial contracts — Uber's trips, Microsoft's platforms, its own apps — untouched by anyone's shareholding. One moat is held together by a marriage, the other by business. Which holds longer over time needs no argument.

One Question Left

Forty years bring the account to this: the collection philosophies have converged — the surveyors are hunting probes, the probe people are buying LiDAR; the production technology has converged — UniMap and Orbis state nearly identical goals. The only thing that has not converged is commercial philosophy: should the raw material be open, and at which layer do you charge?

That question will not be settled by technical review. It will be settled by market clearing — and the clearing is underway: contract flows, shareholder patience, where the talent goes, a scoreboard updated every quarter.

For readers making cockpit sourcing decisions for export programs, here is a reading tool worth more than any platform name. Ask a supplier three questions. Where does your freshness come from — a probe network, fleet feedback, or an open community? Where is your raw-material cost curve heading — proprietary base-map maintenance only rises, while open-base-plus-curation is falling? And where does your chain of liability close — end-to-end proprietary, or open base plus an automotive-grade validation layer? Ask all three, and the answer surfaces on its own.

In an industry whose technology has converged, choosing a supplier is choosing a commercial philosophy. And the correctness of a commercial philosophy is never decided by debate — it is decided by whichever company is still standing.

Sources: HERE UniMap launch materials (CES 2023); TomTom press archives and annual reports; Reuters and euronews coverage of TomTom's 2022 map-making automation restructuring; Tele Atlas's 2008 MultiNet release notes; Glassdoor employee reviews; Bundeskartellamt decision B7-25/22.