This story was originally published on WardsAuto. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily WardsAuto newsletter. With ever-increasing dependence on artificial intelligence for automated driving functions, it's a mistake to think "mapless" systems are the way forward. That's the view of Here Technologies' head of automotive solutions, Remco Timmer, who reverses this view by asking, "Can AI-powered autonomous technology be trusted without a continuously updated understanding of the road ahead?" Speaking with WardsAuto in an online interview, Timmer believes the future of automated driving is not mapless but "map-smart." "There's no point-to-point autonomous driving if you wouldn't know your next destination and if you wouldn't have a route," Timmer said. The minimum necessary for automated driving is a navigable route, he explained, with awareness of the road's rules and regulations, speed limits on those routes and a lot of those things that are not signposted have to come from maps, because they are invisible to the vehicle's sensors. "Autonomy is going to play an important role in urbanized worlds where, for a big percentage of the time, the field of view of the of the sensors, whether it's cameras, radar or lidar, is obstructed by the other road users," said Timmer. "So, it's actually super helpful to be able to plan ahead, do path planning to position yourself on the road and which lanes are going to go in which direction across intersections and at exits," he added. This is referred to as a "continuous lane model," according to Timmer, which allows an understanding of how many lanes are available and how they transition to off-ramps or on ramps. However, even so-called mapless autonomous driving systems, that claim to no longer require the high-definition part of the map, does not mean they are truly mapless. "I