None of this is new, exactly. By taking their own images at the local level, Uber is continuing a project it began last year with mapping technology it acquired from Microsoft. That acquisition already built on a series of decisions that show how Uber is carving out a role for itself among the leaders in self-driving cars. In early 2015, Uber poached dozens of Carnegie Mellon engineers and roboticists—hiring approximately 40 of them all at once—in a move that stunned the university and trumpeted Uber’s seriousness about driverless cars. Uber then acquired the mapping software company deCarta, a development that The Wall Street Journal cast as a way for Uber to “lessen its dependence on Google and Apple.” In May, Uber announced it would begin testing a self-driving, hybrid Ford Fusion on public roads in Pittsburgh. Part of that car’s mission, the company said, would be to “map details of the environment.”

Now, it seems, Uber’s Mexico project is just the beginning of a street-level mapping initiative that could eventually become a worldwide effort. “This new technology, we think, will be able to be deployed more widely more often, so we get more frequent updates and also wider coverage,” McClendon said. “Uber is in 450 cities and we will eventually need to improve maps in many of them based on our usage.”

The timeline for when that happens may be shaped by Uber’s relationship with Google, which is poised to be a direct competitor in the driverless car space. I asked McClendon whether Google might feel a sense of urgency to split with Uber, given the potential for competition, but he declined to guess. “I have no knowledge of how Google might or might not compete with us, but I think it’s a long-term question and I won’t speculate,” he told me.

Regardless of how Uber and Google work together going forward, an increasingly computer-navigated world will dramatically change the human relationship with maps—a relationship that has already evolved significantly in recent years. “The transition from paper maps to online maps to mobile maps to the future, each one of these had huge changes in society,” McClendon said.

For centuries, paper maps were all about discovery, but not necessarily high-level accuracy. You couldn’t easily zoom in on them, anyway, so they didn’t have to be ultra-precise. Online maps gave people the ability to go much deeper into existing representations of the world, and that experience revealed a huge collection of missing data. That happened again with mobile mapping, which amplified errors and gaps in mapping information.

“What mobile maps really did was demonstrate how bad our maps are,” McClendon said. “Because you would be holding your map in your hand on your mobile phone and it would say, ‘This is the name of the street and this is the name of the building and we claim the address is right here,’ and you would just stare at it and go, ‘No. I’m standing right here and that’s not there!’”