In some markets, it is more about getting it right than getting in at the right time. We've seen many carcasses of products that were ahead of their time, not because they were bad ideas but because they were not formulated for mass adoption. Apple's own Newton is one example. It took the iPhone formulation to make the product features successful in the market.
A more recent example is the telepresence robot. Many entries, but still more Newton than iPhone.
With Apple, it's easy to pick out their winners and losers: iPhone, iMac, MacBook, ... vs, Apple TV, Lisa, Newton, ....
At their current scale, Apple needs to enter really big markets in order to move the needle on sales and profits. There aren't many really big tech markets left. Cars are an interesting play in that it combines robotics and consumer tech, and puts them into a market that has room for multiple large players and plenty of opportunity for disruption. The transition to an electric drive train and autonomous navigation presents an entry point. There will be multiple winners.
> "There aren't many really big tech markets left"
I've heard this repeatedly over the years. There are ALWAYS new markets. You just have to look in the right places, or wait for new pareto frontiers to open up.
Imagine going back to the early 1980s and seeing people argue that the personal computer market was too crowded, and there was no way anyone was ever going to make any money in it. The whole thing had played out. Big companies owned the software market. Big companies owned the games. Big companies owned the peripherals. What could possibly be left?
Wait, what's a laptop? What's a workgroup server? What's email? None of those things had really happened, they were all markets just over the horizon about to explode onto the scene.
My 12th grade computing science instructor (who was admittedly horrible) said that she didn't see much of a future programming computers, because pretty much all of the computer programs that were required had been created, and all that was left was to improve the speed, size of documents allowed, and maybe add a few extra features.
And, funnily enough, the word processing tool most often used in my office (Dropbox Paper) is slower, less suited to long documents and has fewer features than the first word processor I used. Still, you can't expect your teacher of 30 years ago to foresee "the future is emojis".
People just want different software every few years, because fashion is fickle there's a natural feeling that old stuff is out of date. Slack doesn't provide any real improvement over an IRC server that keeps its logs around, but it's web-based and it has custom emojis, so...
I mean, did the first word processor you use allow collaborative working on documents available anywhere with an internet connection, constantly backed up to Dropbox servers?
Sure, the internet makes our lives a lot better, but Wordpad sticking regular .rtf files in a vanilla Dropbox folder would provide 80% of the benefit. Realtime same-file editing is convenient, but it's pretty minor really.
It was actually very useful at my last company. We used it in many different kinds of meetings. I think it will pave the way to some interesting collaborative software in the future.
Dropbox has a word processor? My god, Google's offering is bad enough and I hate when coworkers inflict it on me. I hope nobody discovers the Dropbox one.
My father had a completely different experience. His ancient physics teacher said, "computers my boy...they are the future". This would have been some time in the 1970's.
Of-course dad didn't listen and went on to have a unremarkable career as a Structural Engineer.
A real shame as I'm sure he would have made an excellent programmer. I like to tease him over what-ifs - especially as he shares a birthday with Bill Gates.
The computer market was more crowed in the early 1980's that it is now, goto a library and look at an old computer magazine from that period. Dozens of brands with dozens of operating systems.
There are massive, momentous opportunities to create billions of dollars of value in tech in the next decades and beyond. Just imagine every thing you could conceive of that should be physically possible, but no one does currently. The space is almost unbelievably big.
Granted, most of the things you would come up with are currently infeasible due to technological or scientific prerequisites not being available yet, but many of them are also in the realm of "possible, but no one has figured it out yet".
So true. There are always opportunities to create wealth because people never ever happy with what they have and someone else with free time can solve that problem. A company of Apple's size is well poised to make some real great strides in exceptional areas such as self driving cars.
Eccl 1-9 "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
The only device significantly ahead of it in sales is the Roku (Amazon and Google's sticks are ~the same number of sales as Apple TV).
But the market is pretty evenly split in sales and Apple still maintains one of the larger overall install bases for any of them (not the outsized winner it used to be there though of course).
During 2015-16 I was given 3 or 4 opportunities to get a free Chromecast, and I got one. It sits barely used now, in one of the rarely visited HDMI inputs on my TV. I wonder how many of those "sold" devices were actually given away and forgotten.
Chromecast cannot possibly be considered usable by most because it follows a weirdo, google-style, controlled-by-the-browser (but only Chrome) model. It is the most absurd way to watch TV ever invented. I use it sometimes, sure, because it's the only Linux-friendly HDMI dongle (Chrome runs on Linux), but can't imagine anyone actually liking it.
Apple TV, in comparison, is tightly integrated into every MacOS and iOS device, i.e. not only into the OS but often into the applications that run on them. And I don't remember anyone offering a free ATV to me... :)
>Chromecast cannot possibly be considered usable by most because it follows a weirdo, google-style, controlled-by-the-browser (but only Chrome) model. It is the most absurd way to watch TV ever invented. I use it sometimes, sure, because it's the only Linux-friendly HDMI dongle (Chrome runs on Linux), but can't imagine anyone actually liking it.
This only makes sense if you completely disregard the fact that almost all the major VOD providers (excepting Amazon Prime Video) provide Chromecast support in their Android and iOS apps. It's extremely convenient for me; open the app, cast to the TV, and select the video.
I genuinely like the Chromecast. It works with Netflix, Popcorn Time, BBC iPlayer, Twitch, YouTube, and I use an app called Airflow which lets me cast any video file. That's 100% of the TV my family watches. Plus it shows nice pictures in between all that.
I'm totally aware that it's basically just a fancy HDMI cable but we can easily cast from three operating systems, plus all our phones and tablets. I don't want a device any smarter than this, with menus and libraries of stuff it wants me to buy. The Chromecast model works great for us.
Inebriated on that Apple kool-aid I see. I think 90% of the stuff me and my friends play on the Chromecast is initiated by the Netflix or YouTube app, where all I have to do is tap a button. You know what else is great? If we're chilling with multiple people, I don't exclude 80% of them from controlling or playing anything by having an Apple TV. Fancy that, the Chromecast is actually a simpeler, more useable product than what Apple created.
Hold on, how do you let 80% of people to control Chromecast? If anything's it's not controllable by anyone by default because nobody happens to lug around a laptop with a pre-installed chrome extension. I haven't used Android for a while, but on my last Nexus phone Chromecast wasn't useful for anything other than Youtube.
Android + Chromecast integration is really great. You can get automatic playback controls if you're on the same wifi or in near proximity.
Everything I use for media support Chromecast on both iOS and Android (Spotify, Pocket Casts, Netflix, Youtube, etc)
Chrome supports to videos in websites. I'd say most times I go to see if an android app has Chromecast support, it does. I'm not sure how much that's true of iOS apps. I'd guess it's less.
Google home integration is really nice too. I can tell Google home to play something on the Chromecast.
I've worked in places with Macs + Apple TVs in conference rooms, and Airplay was definitely more annoying than Chromecasting.
Localcast on Android allows you cast any video stream (on a browser), or any local file or any chrome tab. So you can stream a presentation from Google Drive.
It doesn't say anything about sales of Amazon devices. And I would take the initial volumes of Chromecasts with a big grain of salt. The iPhone is outsold by Android phones... it's not exactly an unsuccessful product.
While accurate is seems disingenuous to lump $35 devices in with $150-$200 devices and then pretend total units shipped is the only thing that matters (as if Mercedes was a failure for selling fewer cars than Yugo in 1987). Apple could easily make a media stick if they wanted to, but they don't. They used to sell Apple TV's at $100, marked it down to $70 while they phased the cheaper models out and now only sell them at $150 and $200.
Roku had $400 million in revenue in 2016[1] which includes content share while Apple TV produced a billion dollars of revenue back in in 2013 [2]. And Apple's margins are way higher than Roku's. Apple TV, while a self described 'hobby' by Apple (presumably when compared to iOS/Mac), was and still is a very successful product in a category it basically invented.
to be fair, the apple tv remote is fantastic and it's better than any other remote i have used for the common features. (i do wish it had a tv power button though since it can actuate the volume but i guess they wanted to go with the standard that shuts down the tv when you shut off the apple tv if your tv supports it)
Really? The TiVo peanut is still the best I've used. The ability to scrub with the Apple remote is really nice and Siri can be useful but the shape is a disaster and I really miss physical buttons for moving around the interface.
I've got just the apple support document for you! https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205225 If your TV supports HDMI features you will only ever need one remote.
I have a cheap and old tv that doesn't have that hdmi feature is the problem. to be fair, the tv is kinda off brand and doesn't have any mapping in those "universal" remotes so I have to keep the original remote around if I want to turn it off and on with it. kinda a pain.
If you haven't yet, check your TV settings. My Samsung has a buried option "Auto Turn Off" under HDMI. Disabling this prevents the AppleTV from turning off the TV.
Yes there is you should have HDMI CEC settings somewhere depends on the TV you can set what exactly is passed and is it bi-directional or not.
At the least CEC power is available on virtually every appliance I've seen.
It's worth pointing out that the iTunes Music Store was revolutionary for its time. It was the first online music store that was legal, easy to use, and sold popular songs.
>> big tech companies new really big markets to move the needle
The problem is that most big markets are small at start.
Aren't there models to enter many smaller markets , like a VC , but instead of just supplying capital, the big company will also supply some key tech/knowledge/resources advantages, maybe some that are specialty developed for startups , all for equity?
Profitable = Apple wouldn't keep it around if it wasn't.
Revenue = Asymco estimate. Apple lumps it into the "Other" category in its reporting. Horace estimated that it was doing $3bn of revenue a year in 2015. Maybe it's still just a $3bn a year business and not a $4bn a year business, but the point remains that calling it a "loser" is nuts.
Hey now, I LOVE my Apple TV's. They may not have the adoption or attach rate as other multimedia devices but they definitely fill a need for a certain group of people. Since I am all in on Apple they work perfect for me. I just wish they would market it a little better.
Your reasoning is excellent. The only problem is that Apple doesn't have sufficient drive, talent, or reputation, in the auto industry to actually make and sell a good car.
No employee wants to leave Tesla to work at Apple. No consumer wants to buy a car made by Apple. Hopefully Tim and the gang won't blow through too much money before they accept that.
They're pretty good at making phones and computers. They might want to focus on keeping that reputation in the meantime.
Your reasoning is excellent. The only problem is that Apple doesn't have sufficient drive, talent, or reputation, in the cell phone industry to actually make and sell a good cell phone.
No employee wants to leave Motorola to work at Apple. No consumer wants to buy a phone made by Apple. Hopefully Steve and the gang won't blow through too much money before they accept that.
They're pretty good at making computers. They might want to focus on keeping that reputation in the meantime.
I mean from a computer to a mp3 player to a phone is the same ballpark. Electronics. Moving to mechanical systems is a whole different thing.
I'm not saying it won't work out, but I don't think their plan is manufacturing cars. Maybe it's just licensing the self driving tech along with the infotainment system.
Yet somehow Elon Musk went from internet payments to building rockets and cars. Musk had zero background in rockets or cars. Remember Apple is a company that has more cash in the bank than the entire value of Tesla. It's foolish to think that Apple can't execute. Remember Apple has a long history of the last mover advantage: they take promising but cumbersomely executed tech and expand on it.
That's an interesting point and dwells in philosophical space.
Is Apple an entity with knowledge that it accumulates, develops, and applies or are people who work on and hold key positions in projects the ones that bring forth knowledge, develop it and apply it?
Is company's know-how separate from people working on it, and are people the ones who (can) bring it into the company or are people coming to the company and applying company's knowledge? What happens if either lacks - can a company bring in (group of) knowledge and can a company bring in (a group) of talent without (much) knowledge?
Cases can be made for both, I guess. So, there's no straight answer.
Yet hardware, especially dumb mechanical parts like cases, is what distinguishes Apple devices the most. They also design awful inconvenient UIs, just like auto companies.
My point about experience is that it's not Apple building this car, it's basically a new group at Apple handicapped by poor motives.
In the context of my comment, Tesla's answer to "why" was a bit more inspiring than "we need to enter a new market because our existing markets are saturated"
I think Apple may be able to make this distinction as well. You portray them as an incompetent organization based on one defect. And, of course, car manufacturers routinely put out products with life threatening defects (i.e. Takata), so it's not like they're immune from fault either.
I'm not worried about their technical capabilities. I'm worried about a company culture that blames the customer when the product is misused or doesn't meet industry standards in some way. Things they have gotten away with in the phone and computer market will kill people in the automotive market.
I had the iPhone in question (the original 4) and it wasn't that bad. It's not like other consumer products have no glitches and always work perfectly however you use them.
What I'm getting at is that Apple likes to restrict their devices to work very well in the narrow designed use case, and make the non-designed use case very cumbersome.
However, people use cars across broad use cases. Some just commute, but some drive in snow, some need to ford small streams in emergencies, some need to install roof racks, and some want car-seats for infants.
I don't see Apple designing for broad use cases, because it isn't in their culture. And that will be a problem, because cars are not toys that you can choose not to use without large consequences.
Considering they need to answer to, try to communicate with,
and rely on, a bunch of Computer execs, and moreover execs primarily interested in the project for financial reasons...
that's a list of 17 employees who are at high risk of burning out.
> Considering they need to answer to, try to communicate with, and rely on, a bunch of Computer execs, and moreover execs primarily interested in the project for financial reasons... that's a list of 17 employees who are at high risk of burning out.
The profile of Jonathan Ive in the New Yorker last year made it pretty clear that he was interested in the car because he hates his car. But tbh: car manufacturers are primarily interested in "financial reasons" for making cars. That's called being in business.
It's interesting that your original premise has now been refuted:
> The only problem is that Apple doesn't have sufficient drive, talent, or reputation, in the auto industry to actually make and sell a good car.
No employee wants to leave Tesla to work at Apple.
Apple demonstrably has talent from around the auto industry, with reputations which suggest they might be capable of building a good car, and people have left Tesla to join them.
So you're now changing your argument to "well maybe they can hire people, have the reputation, have the drive, and persuade consumers that they want to buy a car from Apple, but those employees have to talk to dumb computer execs!"
I must have forgotten all about Elon Musk's background in automotive manufacturing which makes him uniquely equipped to build an electric self-driving car compared to someone like Tim Cook.
Honestly the arguments you're making are so absurd that they border on the infantile.
If you make facile generalisations in lieu of a nuanced argument you should expect people to react fairly badly. I didn't even get as far as the insanity of "no consumer wants to buy an Apple car".
I've seen the "Acer Ferrari One" laptop, and an Apple Car is the same kind of "wrong." I think Apple might have been able to sell a car if it had come to market five or six years ago. But these days, the world is so over-saturated with Apple (not that I mind, personally) that I don't think there'd be enough enthusiasm.
I'd be worried about the youngs though. 10$ they don't see cars the same way previous generations did. They grew up with smartphones and internet. They may be very curious about feeling the Apple feel with a vehicle.
I might. I love what Tesla is doing but I sure hope there will be competitors (not to take anything away from Lucid, Rimac, Nissan etc). Right now, Tesla is in a league of its own and until the setbacks reported in recent months Google and Apple seemed more suited for competing with Tesla than the traditional car manufacturers and the tiny new EV companies.
Dealing with Apple Store level service for a car that needs regular maintenance isn't going to fly. Imagine waiting 2+ hours for an oil change entry three months.
I have a hard time imagining how Apple Store level service wouldn't be a big improvement over what I currently receive.
Also there's nothing routine I do at the Apple Store that requires me to wait any significant amount of time. Anytime I have a question, or want to buy something, or pick up an online order the service could hardly be any more prompt.
The only thing I have to wait for is the Genius Bar, and if I schedule in advance I don't usually wait very long. And I only have to do that when something actually breaks.
When my car breaks I generally have to schedule something in advance as well.
Agreed, also why would it need oil changes since it would most likely be electric? Scheduled maintenance is a very occasional thing in electric vehicles.
Electric is a much smaller market. And nothing about self-driving requires an electric vehicle.
I'd consider buying self-driving features on a regular car. Electric would be a total deal-breaker for me with today's technology.
Edit: upon further reflection I think it's likely that Apple is just developing the self driving tech and is unlikely to be actually planning to build cars, electric or otherwise.
That last paragraph. The Android model would be very attractive for cars, even for Apple. On smartphones, that model suffers from the hardware being all too indistinguishable. Glass rectangles with or without rounded corners, maybe a button here and there. Car manufacturers by contrast have a century of experience with making mechanical differences count, on top of the same UI everywhere.
For Apple and Google, the case is clear: if they want to defend their incredibly valuable gatekeeper position for local search (the market formerly known as the yellow pages) they need to provide the UI for the car or else they lose much of that gatekeeping. The question is, will any car manufacturers be willing to play, or are they all trying to succeed where Nokia failed?
I don't know much about engines nor cars but I am guessing that even with electric motors one needs gears? If so then there would be a need for gearbox oil.
There isn't a transmission/gearbox, but Teslas undoubtedly have differentials in some form which is where you would definitely find oil. I change the axle oil about once a millennium in my Jeep, so Tesla owners probably don't even think about it. To your point, though, there is probably a single reduction gear to lower the rotation speed of the motor and it might need oil. (Reverse does not require reconfiguring anything in an electric system, given that one just flips polarity. Electric motors have different torque characteristics which obviate the need for traditional gearing.)
I'm guessing service on Teslas is the usual: brake pads every century given that regenerative braking does most of the work, greasing bearings every now and then, coolant, tires, wipers. Internal combustion is extremely complicated in comparison.
This user clearly is a troll and has basically no experience with actual service at the Apple Store, which consistently has the highest marks for service among all retail stores.
Their service may be good for hardware, but from personal experience it has been far from great if you're an app developer. We're in the top 100 grossing apps and can't even get a callback from them, let alone a point of contact if there are issues.
Disclaimer: If it wasn't clear from the username, this is a throwaway. I don't want to endanger my business by associating my rant with my >7 year old HN account :-(
There is a 0% chance that I would ever purchase a car from Apple with their self driving functionality in it.
We recently had issues with a whole bunch of rejections of our app for reasons that are not clearly defined in their guidelines (allegedly they were "new terms" [not documented]... they pointed me to official documents that didn't match what they were telling me). The functionality that they were rejecting our app for initially wasn't new, followed by several rejections for functionality that had been in the app for nearly 2 1/2 years and had approved numerous times over that span.
I've been waiting almost a month for a phone call that they promised me "within 3 business days" to discuss the App Review issues, and have yet to receive it.
While I think that Apple creates some great hardware, and their end user support is likely better than their B2B support (which is IMHO atrocious, unless you're buying more hardware from them), there is no chance I would put my life in the hands of their product or expect them to provide me with safe travel.
You . . . argue that you wouldn't trust an apple car on the basis that they make good hardware, but you have a software dispute with apple?
I'm sure you are very frustrated, but this comment really doesn't make sense to me.
I would tend to think of an apple car as hardware, which you admit is good. And it's probably being driven by apple software, which is sometimes iffy and buggy and downright crappy. I can't imagine a world where your argument makes sense because 3rd party/app story complaints really have nothing to do with this.
It feels like a total non sequitur to me. I'm not going to flag you, but I am going to downvote.
While looking back at it, my comment was a rather vague as to the target... Apple's customer support is spotty if you factor in their B2B (?assuming being an app developer puts you in that position?). I don't want to trust my mode of transportation to them as a result of my experiences.
In this situation, a self driving car is a combination of hardware and software. As you said:
> it's probably being driven by apple software, which is sometimes iffy and buggy and downright crappy
Whether it rolls well is one thing, but I question the consistency of the software from them, as well as their consistency on policies (app rejections)
Apple's software would be a huge improvement over what traditional automakers produce. See Toyota's pile of spaghetti topped with 10,000 global variables, Jeep's "remotely disable brakes through the entertainment unit", etc. Meanwhile iOS, while not perfect, still has the best security architecture of any mobile platform.
It sounds like you have a beef with Apple, but frankly, I want my automaker to be overly cautious with 3rd party apps. Can you imagine the Android model applied to self driving cars?
It looks like the comment you were replying to was trying to equate dealing with oil changes/maintenance to poor customer support in an ongoing relationship.
I don't know that I can fault them for feeling frustrated with Apple's support. The number of times that things have been made obsolete by Apple after just a couple of years doesn't lend a lot of confidence to the thought of a vehicle purchase that you may wish to own for 10+ years.
If you would really like to advance the state of the art for self driving technology, I invite you come up to the mid-west, especially in the winter months, and make your toys work under those conditions.
Working up here will push your technology quite far, with snow, slush, worn away lane markers, cold temperatures, wind, potholes, washboard roads, ice, clogged sensors, blocked GPS, and any number of the above challenges thrown together in random and unpredictable patterns.
If you can get to level 4 or 5 automation in those conditions, making them work in the eternally sunny portions of CA will be a snap.
Sincerely, a Montanan (who is annoyed they had to deal with snow, ice, blocked sensors, and cold temperatures just this morning)
If you really need to understand why car companies will not take your advice, you should look at their sales numbers. Car companies don't sell many cars in Montana. They sell a lot of cars in urban concrete jungles and suburbs like those that exist in California and basically every major city. Solve one major city (especially one with hills like San Francisco), and you've likely solved most major cities, worldwide.
California has 14.5 million cars registered and 2 million new cars are sold in the state each year. There aren't even 14.5 million people in Montana. It's an incredibly easy market to "disrupt" as it were, and they have people in California that are known early adopters to lean on for buying, testing and validating their product. The people of countryside and similar locales are recalcitrant and will see products like these as extraneous, "taking their jobs" and "killing their freedom of driving."
So once they've tackled the low hanging fruit market of California, maybe they might consider expanding into the harsher wilds. But, similar to public transit, the infrastructure worth investing in is infrastructure most people will use, and unfortunately that is not a self-driving Ford F-150.
Car companies sell plenty of cars in Chicago, New York, Toronto, Boston, Montreal, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Detroit, Denver, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh.
It is not necessary for them to operate at full Montana conditions to have a successful initial business. The nice thing about machine learning is that it gets better and better as more data is collected.
So the rational path here is to launch in moderate temperature areas with beta software and eventually refine the tech to operate in adverse condition areas.
Pushing or expecting perfection from the beginning is how thousands of products have died before launching.
The best way to do product development is getting it out of the door as early as possible (in a reasonably safe state) with a competent subset of early adopter users and if possible in an idealized environment/use case. From there you expand and heavily capitalize marketing.
This is what Facebook did when they launched in Harvard and restricted it to only Ivy-league schools. Before slowly expanding to other universities and then the public at large. They called it the bowling pin strategy.
"If your project doesn't experiment first your entire project will be an experiment" - Joe Armstrong (creator of Erlang)
Most major cities in the world? All those major cities that don't get snow and icy roads? Major cities like Chicago, new York, Moscow? Any big city in northern Europe? What about Canada?
Facebook succeeded for years by starting with Ivy league schools before expanding to other US universities, then all western mainstream users, then expanded internationally.
Expecting them to get it right everywhere at launch time is a bad idea.
They can try Naples after they make a billion dollars in US cities. That's always how this stuff works. I've learned that the hard way living in Canada kilometres from the US but having totally different timelines for access to technology. Sometimes it's out of company ignorance but sometimes it makes sense from both a business and marketing perspective.
Do you really think the companies working on self-driving cars are unaware that there are portions of the world where inclement weather and poor road conditions exist? People keep bringing this up in every self-driving car thread as though it's some great insight.
yes, car companies know about snow. and i'm sure they'll solve it when they're ready to. Problems aren't typically tackled by solving every aspect at once, and the fact that nobody is demonstrating anything outside of perfect conditions in southern california should tell you a lot about the state of the technology.
You catch low hanging fruit first before even you think about palm trees. In other words, take care of most common use cases first before you run out of breadth chasing the extreme and difficult scenarios.
There's such an amazing cultural comparison to be made between I-70 over Vail pass (in Colorado) and I-80 over Donner pass in California.
Vail pass rarely closes and is open for vehicle traffic in blizzard-like conditions - but you're on your own. You'd better be well prepared and be the competent driver of a well-maintained, capable 4WD vehicle.
And so, in a blizzard, Vail pass will be nearly empty and the occasional driver will be well-equipped for the trip.
In California, they enforce chain control on I-80 for all vehicles. This has the (amazing, stupefying) perverse outcome of allowing everyone to drive over Donner pass in a blizzard. Further, they are emboldened by the chains to drive quite poorly in conditions they have no idea of how to drive in.
The result is, during a full-blown blizzard, I was driving next to some moron in a RWD camaro trying to bob and weave through slower moving traffic. Dense traffic. Dense traffic largely made of other rear wheel drive cars operated by drivers with no snow driving experience.
The reason they have to enforce chain control over Donner pass is because most Californians live in warmer climates and as such do not have snow tires. Very different to an average Colorado resident who swaps to snow tires during winter. What's the other option ? Just leave it open fully knowing that Bay Area drivers will be driving RWD, summer tires in deep snow ?
This comment gets made in every single self driving car thread. These companies are full of the smartest engineers in the world. They know conditions are different outside of California. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't be focused on California right now.
Of all the SV tech giants (obviously Tesla excluded), Apple has the best DNA to build cars.
They know how manufacture in scale. They know how build a vertical product. They have the cash to do it and they have a strong brand.
But most importantly, if the world moves to a car-sharing car-hailing model of autonomous cars. Ultimately, it becomes a consumer mobile play. This is where both Google and Apple own that experience. Siri will know where you are and when you need a car. This is something both Lyft and Uber wont be able to compete with.
> Apple has the best DNA to build cars. They know how to manufacture in scale.
Something tells me shipping your phones off to be built by other people in China and building your own auto assembly factories from scratch are two completely separate things.
The image of "shipping phones off to be built by other people in China" could not be farther from the truth.
Not only does Apple plan every build in extreme detail (stations, tests, flow, etc), they send an army of PMs, EPMs, engineers, etc. to oversee each build in person. They have to.
Apple's manufacturing and operations expertise is enormous. It's a competitive advantage on the same scale as, say, Google's data center expertise.
> Something tells me shipping your phones off to be built by other people in China and building your own auto assembly factories from scratch are two completely separate things.
This is the question. Indeed, an electric auto is far simpler to manufacture than a legacy auto. Drastically less parts. Similarly, Tesla has demonstrated huge value in software component of the car, from the app, dashboard, OTA updates, not to mention fleet-wide machine learning.
Don't also forget Apple is extremely good at creating electronic devices. Apple has less than 20% of the phone device market but makes well over 90% of the profit. They hardly ever have supply issues (such as Google's Pixel) or quality issues (such as Note 7). Apple is known for their cachet and design but the reason Tim Cook is now the CEO of the largest company in the world is because their supply chain is, by far, the best in the world.
If a company is well placed to make an amazing electric car, it's Apple.
an electric auto is far simpler to manufacture than a legacy auto
That may be the case but it's a solved problem. Legacy makers can churn out engines and transmissions on automated lines with no difficulty. Other than the engine and transmission, the rest of the car is about the same.
They are completely separate. And you point is what?
Apple would likely do cars the way they do phones. So one of the barriers they will crack is Chinese-made cars being sold in the USA. And as a result, I expect that Apple's margins on cars will be triple those of North American manufacturers.
Take the precision by which apple makes watches, laptops or iPhones.
They can scale the size up and with the same precision margins you'll get the car parts. You get BMW or someone else to source you the electric motor. And you just need to manufacture the body the interior part and put in your software. Obviously it's a lot more complex than this. But Apple could easily hire 10-20 people from car industry to fill the missing gap and get there in 5-6 years.
My hobby is metal machining. Precision is a matter of understanding the physics of what you're doing, knowing your machines, and, well, the machines.
I can give you close to 0.0001 tolerances with the machine in my apartment (about 6-7 times better than stock cheap mills that haven't been properly tuned, depending on the material). Use a big, rigid, production-oriented machining center built for it, and you can do better.
I can't build you a car, though. Precision has nothing to do with this.
> But Apple could easily hire 10-20 people from car industry to fill the missing gap and get there in 5-6 years.
Something tells me you haven't been part of a project that involved mass production, complex engineering (not software-engineering; engineering), or regulatory compliance.
If I were to guess, I'd say Apple has already hired at least 10-20 automotive industry lawyers, just to get moving on just the regulatory side of it.
I think this is a troll comment, but if not I ask you to simply look underneath your car.
Any auto made in the last 20 years is incredibly complex. The biggest advancement has been hiding all that complexity.
I have swapped engines and welded cars together, so this is coming from experience. Every car has many sensors, sometimes more than 100. All these sensors feed into enormously complex software state machines written to do all calculations on a RTOS in bounded time and in a verifiably correct manner. This complexity started in, but doesn't stop at, the engine.
You are vastly underestimating the effort needed to duplicate a modern car. There have been times where I've sat for several minutes just marveling at the complexity and beauty of small parts I can hold in my hand. Some of them were surely a years work for an engineer. On any car there are thousands of these clever little parts. For roughly 20k you're buying a product of many thousands of years worth of work.
What we've seen so far from the inside of various ECUs is that they are definitely not always operating in a 'verifiably correct manner', in fact, it's hard to say for sure if the mess of code has had any review or QA imposed on it at all. You'd think so but then it would have looked a bit better.
Yea, but most of those sensors are needed to get that fossil fuel to burn efficiently, and meet emission mandates.
Electric cars would/could be vastly simpler. Simpler if they don't over engineer the vechicles. The current electric vechicles do nothing for me. I hate vechicles that I can't work on.
My hope is Apple builds a simple, open source, except the assisted driving, vechicle. A vechicle that a weekend mechanic could work on? Something like a 80's Toyota. Just a people mover, that lasts.
My fear is they will build a mac book pro on wheels. I've been told the last thing a buyer cares about is the ability/ease of repair. I just don't get it. I don't like things I can't easily repair.
There will be the day when the good job goes bye bye. Plus, there's a freedom knowing you have a chance at repairing something youself when that warranty goes bye bye?
I would love Apple again if they built a practical electric car. Put a few bells, and whistles in it, but don't it impossible to repair.
Manufacturing experience gives them maybe a small edge.
The real question is why would it be a wise move for any SV tech giant to move into the very competitive car industry. Is it a more profitable investment than healthcare, food or shipbuilding?
The fact that they have mobile platforms is irrelevant, unless they plan to ban Uber from their app stores.
That's a ridiculous statement when you don't qualify it with the price at which you would(n't) buy. I am sure Apple would love to own Tesla too, but Tesla shares a very expensive compared to other car companies'. And if Apple were to attempt a hostile takeover, they would have to pay even more. And what exactly would Apple get? Tesla has a fantastic brand, but so does Apple themselves. Tesla has some ability to mass produce cars, but nothing compared to most other car companies. Apple could buy Ford and get much, much better value for its money. The only assets Tesla has that would be of unique value to Apple, are it's employees and maybe some of the tech related to self driving cars.
Buying Tesla would be insane for Apple but bying Ford wouldn't be much less insane. Ford has a huge existing product range that Apple cannot really shape but would still have to support.
If Apple needs auto manufacturing/design know-how they should look at a small company like Volvo or Jaguar.
I agree. I don't actually think it would make sense for Apple to buy Ford. I just used Ford as an example because its market cap is roughly the same as Tesla's.
Ford is tightly owned by the Ford family who control 40% of voting rights in the company. They are unlikely to want to sell or relinquish that control.
Theoretically it would be possible to buy the company without their support - but it would be extremely costly and unlikely.
I agree with you. Apple does have the necessary skills to make a self-driving car. I did cringe at the 'build a vertical product' part because they have not been doing that lately.
I am looking forward to see what they come up with.
I'm not sure they don't, but I'll grant you that it's open to debate. Nobody does supply chain better than Apple, though, and that's gotta be worth something.
If they wanted to Foxconn it, I would think a company like Kia or Hyundai would be a logical partner for them to get into the business. Apple designs it with the help of their manufacturing expertise and imposes their usual tyrannical quality requirements (maybe with the help of some employees they could score from Honda or Toyota to get the requisite quality levels), their Korean partner produces it and everybody's happy.
And what would the benefit be to Kia or Hyundai. These firms have already entered the market chasing Toyota and GM. They have their margin structure baked in already. Moving to low-margin/high-volume contract work would cost them a ton of money.
It's the same reason that, say, Intel doesn't (can't) do consumer logic fabrication to compete with TSMC or Samsung. They have the technical know-how, but their fab capacity is already filled with Xeons that fetch like 4x the margin.
Your main point is valid in the contemporary sense, but don't forget that the Silicon Valley is called Silicon because it used to be the global fab hotspot. While manufacturing chips, boards, accessories, computers, hard drives, card readers, and mainframe racks isn't quite the same as cars, there's plenty of manufacturing know-how in the Silicon Valley. Does Apple have that kind of know-how, and does it make sense for them to acquire it? Not so clear.
Is it just me, or have folks living in the bay area noticed a huge increase in the number of "self driving" cars driving around? I've even seen a minivan with what looked to be a hastly assembled lidar driving around Sunnyvale. The space seems to be really heating up.
It may result in the opposite effect though: pedestrians more willing to cross the street in front of you, and other cars trying to mess with you. (A friend of mine was telling me how he tried going really fast then braking hard behind a self driving car in front of him). The car swerved into the bike lane and almost hit a bicyclist before the driver regained manual control of the car)
Good thing California requires license plates on the front of vehicles. That way, if the bicyclist was hurt/killed, the video recorded by the self driving car would show your friend was the one liable.
I'm not sure that's correct. The self driving car should have stayed in its lane because an accident between two cars is preferable to an accident between a cyclist and a car, especially if the cyclist is not otherwise involved.
Self driving cars should protect the weaker traffic participants, not use their space as a 'get out of the way' option if that space is occupied.
I think you're right about how the car should ideally respond, but I think most courts would find that aggressive or negligent driving that leads to an accident makes that driver responsible, even if another car makes an accidental breach of rules in response to the threat.
Isn't the driver who hit from behind usually at fault. It does not matter if the car ahead of you hits the break for fun or not, you should always be aware and brake accordingly.
That's Texas law for sure: the car that rear-ends another car is always at fault -- and rightfully so: maintaining correct following distance is a fundamental driving skill, one that is sadly ignored in France where I live now.
> pedestrians more willing to cross the street in front of you
I'd be more afraid of crossing in front of a driver-less car. An automatic vehicle may have better reaction times than a human but I wouldn't want to be the first road fatality from a software bug.
I don't know what it's like in the bay area, but in NYC, everyone is an enemy to cyclists. Granted, it's not all our fault. We have our fair share of wannabe lance armstrongs. But most of us are just trying to get to/from work in a healthy way. People who drive hate us, and people who walk hate us too.
London is very much the same. The recent large expansion of cycle routes along the Thames and the resultant roadworks has increased the us vs them sentiment unfortunately :(
For what it's worth, it was intended as a joke, and I didn't vote on your comment either way. If I appreciate someone else's joke here, I'll usually just upvote it.
PS -- If anyone actually does this, e.g. by strapping an old SGI Indy and its 90s webcam to their ride, please post photos here!
There are a lot of startups in the area that work on some aspect needed for self driving cars. Some specialize in the mapping tools needed for current cars (they can only go down streets that have been pre-scanned for them). Others handle the sensors or software to turn that into a useable understanding of the world. My guess is that most of them are either being started, or funded, in hopes of being picked up by one of the big players in this area. I have seen quite a number in Mountain View.
This is pretty exciting but it is also the worst kept secret in the Bay Area :-) I suppose they could have surprised us and filed for a rocket launch license.
I'm not sure what Apple expects to bring to this party but I know if you're getting a masters or PhD right now make sure your thesis topic is machine learning autonomous action in health/life/safety situations :-). I expect you will be recruited heavily.
I doubt Apple will ever launch its own car. However it seems that quite a few large IT firms consider DaaS (Driving as a Service) a viable B2B market. If you can create a superior suite of machine learning tools (including always up-to-date road data) that successfully drives passengers and goods from point A to point B then you can secure big revenue streams from automobile companies for years to come.
I agree. Take a quick look at the value chain, and think about who is going to capture the bulk of the margin. Is it the company building thousands of pounds of commodity pig iron? Or is it the company providing the machine learning secret sauce? Or is it the company making must-have sensors. My bet is on the software and the sensors.
PC's of a couple of decades ago provide a parallel. Microsoft getting 10's of dollars of margin off every PC, Intel getting 10's or maybe 100+ dollars of margin off every PC, and motherboard makers with a gross margin of $3 per board. Much less the case makers....
The old line auto manufactures are building cases for the computers and software that are tomorrow's self-driving cars.
Because manufacturing your own car in large quantities is very difficult. Tesla is a good example on how difficult it is to scale up production numbers. And even though the market / products themselves are changing rapidly the required expertise for a mass production of cars remains the same. I think an acquisition would be slightly more realistic. But has Apple ever acquired an entire product line? I don't think that's in their DNA (EDIT: Beats being one notable and recent exception...).
I agree with your conclusion, but I think your analysis is dead wrong. I don't think Apple would have problems manufacturing cars at scale. They have virtually unlimited money to aquire people with the know how, and to invest in factories. And they have lots of experience with manufacturing already. Sure, cars are different from consumer electronics, but not in any insurmountable way.
The real reason I think Apple would pull the plug on it's car project, is if they believe we are about to move to a transportation as a service world. Ride sharing and self driving cars are trends that point in that direction. Apple is a (consumer) product company. Their internal structure is set up to make the best consumer products and sell them directly to consumers. They are not set up to be a services company. Being a (successful) services company is to some extent antithetical to being a successful product company. Apple knows this.
>Sure, cars are different from consumer electronics, but not in any insurmountable way.
Perhaps not "insurmountable"...
...but you realize that what Apple currently manufactures is equivalent to one single, near-insignificant component of what goes into a car: the on-board navigation system.
Building a car is hard. I don't think Apple can't do it, but I'm convinced they won't find it "worth it".
No, building a car is actually comparatively easy, as evidenced by the myriad of boutique super cars. It's especially easy if what you want to build is an electric car, because electric cars have an order of magnitude fewer moving parts compared to an ICE car. What is difficult is mass producing a car, as evidenced by Tesla's difficulty in doing just that. But Apple has lots of experience at mass production, and they have the means to acquire whatever talent they lack. That's not to say that they are guaranteed to succeed, but they have a much, much better chance than almost any technology company.
So far all the articles I have seen are about Apple experimenting with autonomous technology and most people assume that they are also building an electric vehicle. Those are two very different and challenging projects. I have been an Apple user since 2000 and a Tesla driver for four months and I don't see the current Apple being able to pull off an entire new car platform like that. This isn't a "one more thing" kind of reveal. Look at how long it took Tesla to get to the point where they can mass produce a relatively inexpensive electric vehicle with a basic self driving platform. I am a huge fan of both companies and have stained teeth from all of the Kool Aid, but just getting the battery manufacturing in place seems like an impossible feat for a company that is going to take over two years to design and release a new modular desktop computer for content creators.
Those are two very different and challenging projects.
Exactly. Some self-driving projects have used electric or hybrid cars because they usually have electric power steering, which is easy to control by computer. But the technologies are unrelated.
Heres a question, I know a lot of companies are investing their time/money into working on self-driving cars.. but from what I see, a lot of the cars use the same sensor. LIDAR and cameras being the main sensors. Of course, we have already seen Tesla perform well with these sensors.
However, my question: Is/Was this industry only held back by sensing?
For testing purposes, today's clunky rotating LIDAR units are OK. For deployment, something better will be needed. That's coming along well, but due to lack of a market, nobody is producing in volume yet. I'd bet on Continental, the auto parts company, which is using flash LIDAR technology from Advanced Scientific Concepts.[1] That's known to work well, and ASC has been selling it to DoD successfully. Space-X also uses their units for docking the Dragon spacecraft.
Quanergy has been in "fake it til' you make it" mode for a year now; they announced an impressive product 14 months ago and didn't ship. Their web site looks as if they're shipping, but they're not. Now they're trying to get in on the Trump border wall security business.[2]
It's as if they wanted to present themselves both as an old and respectable company (hence the horse, and name), and yet still modern enough to define the future.
The mashup though is so clumsily done it makes me believe the company is either a very early stage startup, or an utter scam.
Their main website has a splash flash page, which lead me to believe that they didn't put a lot of effort into "public", but not customer, branding. That's reasonable since they're a manufacturer.
However, I've also noted that they're German.
It's not very surprising that a German enterprise isn't spending a lot of effort on its English-language portal.
It's a combination of elements: sensor price, progress in ML, available computational power on board of the vehicle, the advent of electric vehicles, lots of available data and the ability to process all that data, the fact that it is a huge market waiting to be unlocked.
All those together account for a good chunk of the reasons why right now there are at least 10 and probably more parties active (parties that have a credible shot at achieving this).
The real asset is likely all the collected data from the sensors, and not the sensors themselves. The early players have a substantial head start. Their AI software basically has a huge private training corpus that makes it perform better.
Tesla would suffer a bit since their data is less rich without lidar, but make up for some of that with the larger aggregate miles traveled.
Not to say some players don't have better lidar than others, but the sensor quality/price should even out over time since credible third parties are in the business of selling it.
Also, Tesla probably has a plan B for duct-taping LIDAR sensors onto their production cars in case the whole camera + radar + ultrasound approach doesn't work out (or if LIDARs come down in price and turn out to make the system more reliable). With a massive vehicle base and global network of service centers, there should be a possibility there.
I guess you never know with Apple but it just seems like a really crowded space for them to come into, especially if they insist on controlling the whole ecosystem like they do with their other products.
First of all, it's a high price tag for them to get top talent in the area. Waymo, Uber, Tesla, Ford (and a dozen other car companies), and who knows how many start ups are all vying for the same pool of engineers. Even if they get top talent, it's another story holding onto it. If you look at the LinkedIns (Anthony Levandowski, Jur van den Berg, Chris Thrun, all the founders of Otto and Argo AI), they change jobs every two years.
Their success I feel depends on how much control they are willing to give up in partnerships and how good they are at choosing winners in the race to autonomous vehicles. They already have $1B invested in Didi last year--it will be interesting to see where they go from here.
> I guess you never know with Apple but it just seems like a really crowded space for them to come into…
The iPhone entered a crowded phone market and now controls the vast majority of smartphone profits. There's really no such thing as market "saturation" when you can grow the market and eat old participants.
> First of all, it's a high price tag for them to get top talent in the area.
Apple has $250 billion in cash, so this doesn't strike me as a huge concern.
> Their success I feel depends on how much control they are willing to give up in partnerships…
As with phones, their hypothetical success in this area will be due to how much they won't give up. Apple learned this lesson with the disastrous Motorola ROKR E1, a.k.a. the one where they tried to be a "good industry partner" and play by industry rules.
If Apple enters this market, they'll play by Apple's rules and give up virtually nothing. Any launch partner(s) will profit, but on Apple's terms.
> There's really no such thing as market "saturation" when you can grow the market and eat old participants.
The car companies aren't making the same mistake that Microsoft and other old tech companies made with smartphones. They all see that autonomous vehicles are coming and they're doing their best to put out their own solutions. For them to "grow the market," they have to do AVs far better than everyone else. It's tough to imagine them doing that with Google working on this since 2009.
> Apple has $250 billion in cash, so this doesn't strike me as a huge concern.
It's an arms race to outspend in this area. Yes, they could muscle their way through, but only at a huge cost. And even then, employees could leave to start their own startups (see Faraday Futures, Otto, Argo AI, etc.)
> If Apple enters this market, they'll play by Apple's rules and give up virtually nothing
There are way more parts in building an autonomous vehicle than a mobile phone. This graphic [1] does a good job of getting into some of involved industries. Shareholders won't stand for them to sink money into reinventing the wheel (e.g. car components, vehicle to vehicle communication software, AI.)
> The iPhone entered a crowded phone market and now controls the vast majority of smartphone profits. There's really no such thing as market "saturation" when you can grow the market and eat old participants."
The iPhone was far superior to other phones of its day. Plus it had significant network effects - having more users meant having more apps, which meant having more users.
Self driving tech would be much more a commodity product. Even some Apple employees "struggled to explain what Apple could bring to a self-driving car that other companies could not" [1] And self driving cars will have absolutely no network effects or 'lock-in'. Ford will dump Apple's self-driving technology in an instant if Google offers their technology a bit cheaper.
Idk, services have never been their primary product. It was always a hardware product, and all the software and services around it were enablers of that hardware. Sure, they could change and start a service product, but it just feels awkward.
Wow. Amazon is probably working on it too. Great that 10 years from now we'll be seeing Teslas, Apples, Googles and Amazons on the road more than Fords, Chevys, Hondas and Nissans. Interesting times.
I'm not sure that's actually the case. It's still up in the air whether Apple, Google, and Amazon are actually going to be building the cars or just building software/hardware that auto manufacturers can add to their cars.
I suspect, at least in the beginning, they will just be building autonomous technology and letting the auto manufacturers add it to their cars.
Uber and Google/Waymo do it in Phoenix quite a bit. The roads are perfect for first iteration/testing, mostly 1 mile squares and less intense. I see many Waymo and Ubers on the road here.
My guess: they saw a flooded market with no brand loyalty because its a box that sits unnoticed in an office or living room and said "We can leave the scraps for Linksys and TP-Link" then saw Tesla's margins and said "Yeah, that looks nice."
1.) That article is from 2015.
2.) Dividing operating losses by number of cars sold is...not a very good way of calculating things. You're taking R&D, new capital (Gigafactories, retail outlets, acquisitions like SolarCity) and all other expenses and dividing by number of cars sold. It makes for a nice clean Excel spreadsheet (A1 divided by A2) but a poor understanding of how emerging businesses with huge growth potential work under the hood.
It's a more recent article but doesn't invalidate the primary point: the cars aren't losing money, vast capital investment results in losses. The stock price remains high despite this because significant investments implies significant future growth and innovation.
Are you kidding me? Tesla? Tesla owns one factory, which they bought used from Toyota. They have yet to demonstrate the ability to manufacture at anything approaching the scale of other, more affordable car brands. Catching up to Tesla's ability to produce cars will not be the problem if Apple decides to enter that market.
self-driving cars are becoming a crowded space. Too many players, with no clear winner in sight. The real problem to solve here is not technical , its regulatory.
Tesla and Google have some advantage, but it is still far from reality.
The main problem is totally technical! Robot cars can barely deal with following white lines on the road. How about rain, construction, poorly marked roads, fallen trees, badly parked delivery trucks, emergency vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, etc? Can cars read roads signs and understand them? We'll have full-on AI before self-driving cars are for real.
Honestly, I am completely baffled that people who write software think self-driving cars are just around the corner. At this point I think it's basically a futurist cult.
Yeah, and you can easily handle driver negligence in the easy part with always-on driver assistance. Plus it's unacceptable to allow humans away from the steering wheel when they are needed 1% of the time.
This is assuming that "self-driving cars" isn't just another name for driver assistance packages and is actually level 5 autonomy (which a few of my friends believe will be on the road this year with Tesla model 3)
Can't we just accept that the car won't drive itself in the snow or rain or with a missing headlight?
I'd find that totally reasonable, and get back behind the wheel to take my own risks in a snowstorm (or ... you know... stay at home like the advisories always tell you to).
I would absolutely not find it reasonable if my "self-driving" car won't drive itself in the rain or snow, given that in my climate, it is raining or snowing >270 out of every 360 days of the year.
Such a product would still have a large market value since there are nice climates with dense populations in the world too, but not everyone lives in California.
I actually live in Virginia. We get snow and rain just as much as any where else in the N.E. USA.
However our yearly precipitation is ~132 days, where each of those isn't a straight 24 hours of rain or snowfall.
I wouldn't find it terrible to buy a self-driving car that runs 2/3rds of the year without any problems, and I need to drive personally if and only if I must go out during heavy rain or snowfall instead of waiting 1 hour for the rain to stop.
Right now, many times I just wait for the rain to stop before going out because there isn't anything pressing or time sensitive about needing groceries on a Tuesday.
What you said -- plus: the last thing you want is a car that 'self drives' until the conditions suddenly change at high speeds and the half-aware driver is forced to take over unprepared and unalert and convinced that his/her car is supposed to be driving for them.
Elevators and trains are not even in the same ballpark as cars, and the busses you linked to can't function on public roads. They don't have the ability to interact with other vehicles.
It's entirely valid to state that we can do lots with our current tech, because we can, but when the topic is self driving cars on public roads, it makes no sense to claim they're possible without general AI based on the fact that an existing bus can drive around a closed course.
Giving those busses the ability to navigate arbitrary situations on public roads is not simply an incremental improvement, it requires that you solve a fundamentally different problem.
A fully autonomous self-driving car (if that is what you mean by self-driving) will have to be capable of reasoning it's way out of every possible situation, which requires general AI.
The sheer number of cars used and the variety of places they're used in means that thousands of cars get caught up in bizarre situations every day. Cars will be shutting down inconveniently all over the place unless they can apply general reasoning skill to navigate through the innumerable trials that drivers currently have to cope with.
I can think of a ton of everyday problems that will require actual AI: Following detour signs. Understanding a cop's hand signals. Understanding crossing guards in school zones. Making room for emergency vehicles on crowded streets. Driving on dirt and gravel. Navigating parking garages (ever notice that signage in garages isn't standardized? Probably not, because you're not a robot).
Most of the self-driving crash videos I've seen involve a car that lost it when it couldn't follow the white line. Following the white is not good enough.
Non-sense. Full-on AI is completely another level compared to self driving cars.
It is like saying that we'll have full blown image recognition before pong.
If by self driving you mean driving in a single lane on a highway, then sure, a lot of cars have "automated cruise control" with "lane keeping assists" and "collision avoidance".
But if you mean truly driverless cars on public roads, with noone in the driver seat, then sorry, driving isn't just riding in a lane and reading a handful of road signs. It includes responding to anything in your environment. For example, if you see a ball bounce in front of your car, you will instinctively slow down since there might be a kid running after the ball. A driverless car making that inference? No chance.
Apple is good at UX and design. A L5 Self-driving car implies no UX at all, and most people won't care of the design if Self-driving cabs become a commodity. Apple is not about logistics.
First,who dies Uber think it is circumventing the medallion sytem that taxi companies must abide by.
Second, who does Apple or Google think they are by imposing dangerous obstacles on us on our roadways.
Does anyone care that regulatory realities will prevent driverless cars from ever carrying human passengers?
Planes and trains have been driving themselves for many years but they still have human pilots. The human need for somebody to blame is stronger than market forces trying to eliminate human drivers
There's not really studies on the subject. The need for a human to be in control of machines that carry other humans seems to be an innate human trait from my perspective.
Humans have proven themselves to be mentally flexible by, for example, training themselves not to have a fear of snakes which is believed to be an innate fear of primates, speculatively including humans.
This means humans could possibly overcome the fear of being in a fast moving vehicle without human control, but I would argue that the self discipline needed to train our entire population not to fear these vehicles would be enough of an obstacle that they will never be realized.
There's also the human factor at play. For a long while humans and robots will be sharing the road, and as soon as human drivers learn that the robots will avoid collisions at all costs they will start abusing machine controlled vehicles. A human will reach a point where they say "Well, fuck it just run into me then" but it would be unethical to program a machine with the same logic. Other humans know they can't fuck with people too much or they risk a confrontation. I think its an open question how nice society will be to participant unable to retaliate.
A more realistic path for self driving vehicles is special segregated lanes on highways. This is already done for HOV vehicles so much of the infastructure and design is already in place. Self driving transports would use these lanes connect between hubs where the vehicles are brought under human control for the short and more chaotic final leg to their destination. This could be workable with our current highways and without scaring the hell out of anyone, but it means that much of the research towards these vehicles is currently misguided.
Sorry for posting a short and hollow response originally. I have been accused of doing so on the site before but my reasoning is to try to avoid giant walls of text like this. You're right in implying.l that such short and zany sounding answers don't add much to the discussion
> I think its an open question how nice society will be to participant unable to retaliate.
I suspect that the initial implied liability carried by the first batch of commercially sold self-driving vehicles will lead to extensive sensor logs and 360° dash cam recordings. In the event a human driver tries to game a self-driving vehicle and it causes an accident, the extensive data logging will supply far more than traffic courts and insurance companies have ordinarily dealt with before, and likely lead to new legal precedents.
If the LIDAR data logging shows a human driver recklessly accelerated towards the self-driving car (presumably thinking it would get out of the way) and the path of least damage correctly chosen was to stay put because of merging cars on either side, then most attorneys and insurance companies will find it hard to challenge sub-second LIDAR data that can be reconstructed to overlay data on the video log.
One potential development out of this push for self-driving vehicles that might catch us by surprise is ubiquitous, extensive data logging in vehicles, both human- and computer-driven. In order to sell the tech at a mass scale, all sorts of sensors must sell much cheaper than even today, and they won't necessarily be limited to only computer-driven cars. Like cell phone cameras made solid-state cameras and storing large amounts of photos and videos cheaper than the mass market imagined possible only 30 years ago, and now people are putting those camera sub-assemblies to use outside of cell phones.
I believe you are right about all of these legal issues, but a very human question remains. If a machine is driving, who decides who dies?
As shitty as the human race is much of the time, people in life or death situations regularly show a lack of self preservation when given the choice between saving themselves or someone else. Human history is littered with countless real, and imagined, heroes that gave their lives to help the species. How does this relate to self driving cars?
A real situation these cars will deal with is weighing the potential death of their occupant vs another person. Humans regularly swerve off the road to to avoid hitting pedestrians and animals. Sometimes they die doing this. If a machine goes on trial for killing a pedestrian rather than risk a 10% chance of death for its passenger, what do we do? A human in most situations would have risked their life to avoid certain death of another, but it's unethical (and nobody would buy) a machine that could willingly sacrifice its owner under any circumstances.
I believe this dilemma is un-solvable. This and similar situations will quickly result in laws that require a human to always be present, negating most of the advantages of automated driving
You are correct; it is un-solvable through technical means, as this dilemma requires a cultural shift that could take several generations to accept sensor- and machine-made decisions that are the embodiment of likely monied interests' policies who will lobby for the necessary legislative scaffolding. Not that will prevent companies from trying technical solutions: it may push sensor boundaries much further out, and at far greater granularity, for example. Scanning out to the mechanical limits of braking distance at current measured road traction, modeling every detected element, and simming projected versus actual paths microsecond by microsecond, and ultra-defensively maneuver. Not even limiting to just reacting to unfolding emergencies, but proactively easing out of potentially developing risk, like noticing it might get boxed in by human-driven vehicles (maybe identified by their erratic steering, not even requiring an IFF-type system), and easing out to join a "herd" of self-driving cars further ahead.
On the train point, humans have operated fully automatic rail systems for nearly fifty years (the London Underground Victoria Line opened in 1968; BART in San Francisco is similarly automated and open in 1972). The first unattended train to my knowledge, the Vancouver SkyTrain, didn't open til 1985, or 17 years later.
My interpretation: it took a while—17 years—for people to warm up to driverless trains on fixed routes with no at-grade intersections.
Although it wasn't that long ago when BART workers went on strike, replacement workers (former BART operators) stepped in to operate the trains, and then promptly ran over and killed two workers performing track maintenance.
What about security concerns? I assume self driving cars could be made to remotely shut down or report tampering. With high profile terrorist attacks using vehicles it will become attractive for safety.
You can also reverse that: A self driving vehicle is actually more usable for a terrorist attack because it doesn't require you to sacrifice the driver and all the gear for full remote control is already on board. It's basically a software issue to turn it into a remotely guided inertial weapon.
Wait, you mean self-driving / remote control is good for security?
> "We can disable the ignition but not while you're driving," Melanie Boudreau, a spokesperson at IMETRIK, a Canadian maker of starter interrupt devices that run around $100 each, told Fortune. "We don't want to kill you."
A more recent example is the telepresence robot. Many entries, but still more Newton than iPhone.
With Apple, it's easy to pick out their winners and losers: iPhone, iMac, MacBook, ... vs, Apple TV, Lisa, Newton, ....
At their current scale, Apple needs to enter really big markets in order to move the needle on sales and profits. There aren't many really big tech markets left. Cars are an interesting play in that it combines robotics and consumer tech, and puts them into a market that has room for multiple large players and plenty of opportunity for disruption. The transition to an electric drive train and autonomous navigation presents an entry point. There will be multiple winners.