Apple Maps mapping van sighted on Detroit suburbs expressway

Apple is working to improve its maps offering by collecting camera and other data, as reported by The Verge on 6/10/2015.

One of the vans had been previously spotted in June in downtown Detroit, as shown on a map of Apple Map van sightings collected by Mac Rumors.  The earliest listed was in 8/2014.  The last update to the map was in 7/27/2015, so I will not bother submitting this sighting

The two new (as far as I know) items that the 12/10/2015 sighting adds

• The van had "Apple Maps" written on the side.  Early sightings, before Apple announced the project publicly, did not have this.
• Apple has apparently finished focusing on downtown Detroit, and is now working on the suburban expressways.  (The van changed from eastbound I-696 to westbound I-696.)  They do not yet seem to be focused on residential areas in Detroit, unlike reported sightings in other metropolitan areas.

Results and data from a small test of phone GPS navigation app data usage

Off-board, cloud based cell phone GPS navigation takes around 1 to 15 megs per trip, with wide variation based on pre-caching, length of route, and other unknown factors.

A limited test on iOS shows Apple Maps and Google Maps to both have under 0.5 megabyte data usage for most navigation steps.
It seems on iOS, Apple Maps has a less data usage compared to Google Maps.  However, it is not a large enough difference, in my opinion, to affect most users.

Scout by Telenav has consistently higher usage, but again it is debatable if over a month if it would add up to enough to affect any users.

The main item to note is if a user wants to save mobile data usage, preplanning and letting system precache data while on a WiFi connection is a worthwhile way to save a megabyte or two of data usage per trip.