Hey, I can understand not liking it but so far, maps are absolutely "integral" to the operations of self-driving cars. Maybe they'll be less "preposterous" later.

"Almost all of the fully autonomous vehicles currently allowed on public roads are still under the direct supervision of human pilots, and they’re only driving on roads that have been heavily studied and mapped in three dimensions."

See:

https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/self-driv...

or "Cars will only be able to drive themselves if they have access to high-precision maps. The digital material contained in today’s navigation systems is not enough. To be able to drive itself safely, a car needs to know its position on the road down to the centimetre. "

https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/next/connecti...

It's integral to a certain class of self-driving cars. Waymo relies on centimeter-level mapping of the environment, and sure, could not possibly operate without a map. The car establishes its exact environment in the world using the maps, and I presume then looks for things then in that environment to track.

Comma.ai, on the other hand, feeds their AI the camera feed and the sensor signals from the car, and it responds, as far as I know, almost entirely based on that stimulus. Of course, Comma.ai's car is presumably less predictable, it relies on a black box to "think", but you could feed it the general concept of what path to take from A to B, even a set of waypoint GPS coordinates of where to turn, and hypothetically, such a car could navigate to that destination otherwise offline, or with the grade of maps reasonably available offline. It's intended to drive like a human drives: Based on the information it perceives in the world around it.

Comma.ai doesn't appear to have cars that even approximately drive themselves (it's got adaptive cruise control, sure, but so does every car company now). It has a camera. Sure they have a proposal to not use maps, but they don't have a result.