The concept of cars that drive themselves has been evolving rapidly, and has been one of the quickest tech ideas ever to become reality. According to some, cars could be driving themselves in a couple of years, legally, on public roads.

For cars to know how to react, they will be relying on a variety of sensors, including cameras, liar and radar, that recognise roads, other cars, pedestrians and so on. To be truly autonomous, they will need access to maps, and those maps will need to be much more advanced than those currently in use:

Google often leaves the impression that, as a Google executive once wrote, the cars can “drive anywhere a car can legally drive.” However, that’s true only if intricate preparations have been made beforehand, with the car’s exact route, including driveways, extensively mapped. Data from multiple passes by a special sensor vehicle must later be pored over, meter by meter, by both computers and humans. It’s vastly more effort than what’s needed for Google Maps.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530276/hidden-obstacles-for-googles-self-driving-cars/

This is exactly the level of mapping that MapMerge suggests. So, if so many different uses can be found for advanced mapping, it makes sense that they all use the same map. And that’s why Google is such a good candidate for MapMerge, as they will most likely be mapping all the roads in the USA anyway:

The key to Google’s success has been that these cars aren’t forced to process an entire scene from scratch. Instead, their teams travel and map each road that the car will travel. And these are not any old maps. They are not even the rich, road-logic-filled maps of consumer-grade Google Maps.

They’re probably best thought of as ultra-precise digitizations of the physical world, all the way down to tiny details like the position and height of every single curb. A normal digital map would show a road intersection; these maps would have a precision measured in inches.

…Google has created a virtual world out of the streets their engineers have driven. They pre-load the data for the route into the car’s memory before it sets off, so that as it drives, the software knows what to expect.

… A whole virtual infrastructure needs to be built on top of the road network!

Very few companies, maybe only Google, could imagine digitizing all the surface streets of the United States as a key part of the solution of self-driving cars. Could any car company imagine that they have that kind of data collection and synthesis as part of their core competency?
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2014/05/all-the-world-a-track-the-trick-that-makes-googles-self-driving-cars-work/370871/