What is the best grid-map for self-driving cars localization? An evaluation under diverse types of illumination, traffic, and environment

•Localization with occupancy or reflectivity grid maps is more accurate.•Semantic grid maps lead to stable and reasonably accurate localization.•Localization with colour grid maps failed due to changes in illumination.•Entropy correlation coefficient is not a good metric for comparing colour maps.•The two-step mapping technique was successfully employed in all experiments.