Over HD Maps uit transcript:
Francois-Xavier Bouvignies -
That's clear. And last one for me, and I will leave the floor to my peers. Around HD Maps. So you talked about ADAS content going up. Obviously, the pandemic created some uncertainty around the roadmap for autonomous driving, like you described last quarter. How is it going your HD Maps? I mean now we are 3 months, probably your customers have more visibility. Do you see the activity resuming for HD Maps? And how should we think about the contracts compared to, for example, what you said last year at your Capital Markets Day that you were rewarded, of course, on a small value market of 60% of the deals. How is it evolving these HD Maps in your deal pipeline?
Harold C. A. Goddijn -
Well, as I said, so HD Maps are applied in different ways throughout the technology stack. But if I look at the market for self driving and the progress that we've seen there, I have to say that has disappointed this year. I think there are 2 things playing a role here. First is the complexity of self-driving technology and that’s a thing that has been underestimated.
The step from, let's say, Level 2.5 to 3 is a little bigger than most carmakers had anticipated is our impression. And the second one is justification of the system cost. The total bill of material for self-driving seems to be higher than originally anticipated and the ability for the market to absorb those costs seems to be limited. So overall, it has been disappointing in that domain. I don't think carmakers are losing sight of the end game. They're still working and investing, and so is our Tier 1s and all the suppliers and working hard to make the technology better and cheaper and democratize that.
But net-net, I think the developments in 2020 for us as a vendor, as a system component for Automotive self-driving systems in large-scale applications has been disappointing.
Francois-Xavier Bouvignies -
And what can you do about that? I mean, do you intend to change, therefore, maybe the investment or the development of HD because you see that it's not very high demand at the moment. Or you want to continue to invest and see how it looks like in, let's say, 1 year, 6 months' time?
Harold C. A. Goddijn -
Well, there are 2 levels of cost and investment going into creation of HD Maps. One is the technology itself to produce then what we call the pipeline. And there, we keep motoring. We keep investing in optimizing that pipeline for creation of HD Maps. And again, this is not just for HD Maps but also ADAS features. So this is a combination of video processing, LIDAR processing, applying of machine learning and visual recognition.
That's a complete domain of technologies and pipeline where we're quite heavily investing in. And that is, overall, to make the production of maps, ADAS Maps, HD maps, scalable, affordable and to a high standard of quality and that investment is continuing. If you look at the other side, so the actual production of HD Maps, we have slowed that down to an extent or we have not increased activity there. We're not extending our coverage at this stage. We have a product for the major roads in North America and Western Europe, where we provide HD Maps to the industry for evaluation, development and so on and so forth, that will continue, but we are not accelerating the coverage. The main effort now is to reduce cost of production and maintenance of those maps and that continues unabated.