Maybe they'll replace it with a few of the features of Waze but without ads, adds stuff that have been asked for by people for years and the Google Maps look, call it Google Ways and act like it's going to be continued to be developed as Google Maps 2.0. Then Google Maps goes away but Google Ways never gets updated with anymore features.
All the competitors on the market lose a large part of their customer base now.
Then one day Google Maps makes a reappearance to replace Google Ways. You can now select an icon to represent your car but otherwise, it has no Waze features and has less features than the original Google Maps but they promise they'll be porting those features over. They never do.
That's pretty much the kind of thing I expect from Google.