- This is only for experimental self-driving vans shuttling employees. It will have drivers to take control on demand.
- Initially Apple planned self-driving vehicle where 4 seats face each other, sunroof material that gives less hit, electrically tinted windows and holographic windshields.
- Project was abandoned because they realized "designing and building fundamental parts of a new car was not simple".
- Apple tried to partner with someone who can do manufacturing while they do design. BMW, Mercedes, Nissan - all rejected that offer.
- Ive was charged with design. Tim Cook drives BMW so he wanted to partner with them.
- VW accepted the offer because they have been beaten a lot. They will supply basic components while Apple will add others.
It surprises to me no end that a company with $100B in funds, vast experience in supply chain and ability to suck up virtually all talent is struggling so badly at a technology that is over 100 years old while Tesla with its shoestring budgets leap frogged all established players. Goes on to show that leader at the top makes all the difference in the world.
Kudos to NYT for doing investigative journalism.
Their supply chain experience is for completely different parts. The suppliers for computer and phone parts are not the same suppliers as those for engine parts, wheel parts, etc.
Apple wouldn't just need to hire the right people - they'd need to build out the factories and supplier relationships and dealer networks and everything else from scratch. Recall that Tesla was founded in 2003, and what you look at now is the product of fifteen years of corporate development - and they're still not on the level of Detroit's Big Three.
Really, Apple would need to acquire a car manufacturer, but when you look at the market caps of various car companies - GM's is $53B, Ford's is $44B, Chrysler's is $34B, BMW's is $56B, and so on - buying a controlling stake in any one of them is doable, but constitutes using quite a lot of Apple's cash reserves. It goes to reason that there'll be opposition within Apple to using that much of the cash reserves on any one bet.
I don't like the idea of Tim Cook going to BMW just because he drives and likes BMW however... I think it's a bad way to make decisions.
[1] https://www.motor1.com/news/238922/aston-martin-stock-market...
Tesla's autopilot is a PR move to try to raise more capital. They are not and will not be a serious player in driverless cars.
What they've got is a system doing object detection. Object detection is actually one of the easiest parts of driverless cars. Planning and interaction end up being much harder and requiring a lot of data, none of which Tesla has collected. (Also, in practice you need lidar and a fully mapped road, neither of which Tesla has; we're at least a decade from the top players who are actually collecting large scale urban / suburban data from dropping the map requirement, and there's really no reason not to use lidar as the price is dropping so quickly. Both reasons Tesla's "we've got lots of data" claim are BS...)
To play devil's advocate - somehow I drove myself to work today, and the hardware I'm running is just two moderate resolution limited field of view cameras. Not an expert, but from first principles it should be possible to pilot a self-driving car with cameras only, given enough processing power and a smart enough agent. Maybe those last two aren't there in 2018 though.
Look at who's at leadership positions at VW, look at the hierarchies of these old German companies. You're just looking at the money. These companies are too big to fail for the German government.
They're so comfy sitting in those chairs. They know something is wrong, but they don't really feel the heat. In the back of their minds they're just waiting for retirement and want to change as little as possible from the status quo. If they do and something goes wrong, they catch the blame. If they don't and things go wrong, their predecessor is to blame.
That won't stop them from talking about innovation and change all day long though.
In the end I won't tell you trust me, I know, I spent two years in such a place, but I can tell you that once you start changing your perspective the entire madness starts making sense.
The investment for manufacturing a modern car are huge, and you need someone like Musk no Cook to take on the challenge of starting from scratch, and the supplier market for car part is entangled into cartel like behaviour, which will be very hard to break by an outsider.
Tesla still hasn't demonstrated that they are capable of building a mid-range car profitably. And with the ongoing low production numbers for the Model 3 it seems like running a profitable company that mass produces cars is a lot harder than Tesla thought.
Maybe they just want to get into cars but also not burn money in a massive way. Like Tesla is doing.
That's not true at all. Tesla is currently failing at engineering cars, manufacturing cars and their automated driving tech is actively killing people.
And what they aren't failing at, spectacularly succeeding in fact, is in marketing. They are a household word; their cars are considered the top of the heap as electrics go.
Rejected rightly so. That’s pretty smug of Apple. Seems they are forgetting about “design for manufacture”. I can see some hooty tooty Apple “designer” interacting with a group of grouchy, old automotive engineers.
“Initially Apple planned self-driving vehicle where 4 seats face each other, sunroof material that gives less hit, electrically tinted windows and holographic windshields. - Project was abandoned because they realized "designing and building fundamental parts of a new car was not simple".“
This is the attitude of Silicon Valley. Ignoring the “fluff” for some grandeous bullshit. They’d have a holographic windshield that crashed and rebooted constantly. Tesla is learning this the hard way, as they can’t even get their body panels to fit correctly. And I’m supposed to trust them with self driving?
Time will tell, I wish Apple the best in any regard. While I personally do not trust self-driving cars fully as a developer (software can and does fail for any given reason, and even car components aren't reliable / long lived enough in some cases, anyone else have that pesky tire air light come on recently? You'd think that sensor would just work kinda thing...) I don't mind some of the tech that could be created out of it, like warning a driver when they're trying to shift to a lane with a car too close for comfort, and other things. In other cases I wish we had self parking cars be much more common, some people just do not park right at all.
It's a match made in heaven.
Who else made software that runs the engine in cheat-mode when under emission test, which is what VW was caught doing?
But at this point, I think the only ways to catch up is to gobble up a few AI powered startups with their cash.
If this fails, I don't think 'Apple has little experience with building AI-driven software' will be a prominent reason. It would in a simulated world where Apple was not allowed hire any expertise, acquire any companies or technology and spend none of its cash, but could only divert the engineers who worked on Siri to this project. Sure. But that just isn't the case.
They don't. Android was an acquisition and so was Waymo.
Is good enough for the cast majority of users but not as slick and quite as feature rich as the competitors? Sure.
But the privacy angle means it’s the only game in town as far as I’m concerned
A bit? The gap is large and only getting larger by the year.
Google has been working on understanding humans for 20 years and building global scale services. It's no coincidence that it is moving much faster than Apple in this space.
VW have significant experience of producing cars for other manufacturers, and put a lot of effort into developing reusable "platforms". They are super popular in Europe- hitting the exact sweet spot between practicality and desirability (Top Gear described the Golf as "the car that everybody buys with their own money"). The forthcoming ID range is perhaps the strongest lineup of EVs in any manufacturer's pipeline. They need more traction in the US, and it therefore makes sense to partner with the arguably coolest US corporation.
But jokes aside I wouldn't be so sure about this. DHL has famously chosen StreetScooter instead of VW to built their last-mile fleet and the top brass in VW were also famously upset about this.
Also sales of the first gen Golf EV weren't even of the same order as sales of e.g. the LEAF - perhaps because VW insisted on keeping diesels alive longer than it made any sense.
Also: Independent from current market value and imagining the law wouldn't exist they'd still have to pay quite a surplus on the market value and then have major trouble in handling a company of that size.
(Edit: oh I missed that the law has been changed since the Porsche takeover story ...)
Vehicle electronics packages and AR would seem to be two areas that could benefit from refinement as the underlying technology becomes available.
One of the next iPhones will have eye tracking and high quality 6dof (positional) tracking. Those two features basically turn your phone/iPad into a hand held portal into AR/VR.
The hand held form factor will be at least as big as the HMD form factor... probably bigger honestly.
Apple has prototyped this kind of experience with Pokémon Go. There is no company better positioned to take the AR market than Apple. In all likelihood your next iPhone will be the world’s dominant AR platform.
This is not fanboying... I think industrial AR and HMDs are very interesting. It’s just clear to me that Apple has the audience in both users and app developers to deliver both sides of this marketplace much faster than anyone else. And it’s also clear to me that handheld has major advantages over HMDs that will especially affect the consumer market.
If Apple releases an AR headset, you can bet it'll basically be Google Glasses, but good.
But now EVERY major car manufacturer is hot for self-driving vars. Intel, NVidia, Waymo, Uber, Lyft, countless startups etc. I can’t see how Apple can contribute here something meaningful, or make money, I think they should drop the project.
A lot of SV companies only know software. And in software it's easy to fix bugs on the product later. Something that's impossible for mechanical things. That's why they all think it's easy to build your own car.
A car is fairly simple, but mass producing it, and getting all the suppliers to work together properly is hard.
Car manufacturers on the other hand have the tendency to treat software like hardware, because the leaders come from hardware. This leads to cultural problems with creating software.
What's hard is (a) building lots of cars as Tesla is finding out and (b) building a perfect self driving car. Now Apple is one of the best companies in the world at manufacturing and as we've seen with FaceID they have a strong grasp of integrating neural networks into commercial products.
So I would never underestimate Apple of all companies.
More about Torc Robotics, founded by Virginia Tech autonomous vehicle competition team:
I can see why a self driving car appeals to Apple since Apple's expertise is integrating software and hardware in a high quality way but I don't see this as something the need to do to not be left behind.
Amazon is working on it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/12/intel-cisco-and-amazon-intro...
I am not saying it can't be done. But Apple has been quite bad at machine learning so far.
Wait for someone to walk in the door with a design that Philips rejected?
Instead, Apple has signed a deal with Volkswagen to turn some of the carmaker’s new T6 Transporter vans into Apple’s self-driving shuttles for employees — a project that is behind schedule and consuming nearly all of the Apple car team’s attention, said three people familiar with the project.
This is more like "we give up, but will do a symbolic project so we don't look too stupid."
This is harder to do than the web/mobile crowd thought. This is hard real time high-reliability, like avionics. Google/Waymo gets this. Most of the others don't. So far, Tesla, Uber, Volvo, and Apple have failed. Not sure about Cruise yet, but I saw one of their vehicles get stuck behind a double-parked car in SF and the human had to take over.
It's a good match in terms of synergy, but I don't see it doing much to grow the customer base of either company even if it might grow the revenue per customer. A term I've used for it in the past is "choir mining" where you keep squeezing your existing customers.
Not sure about US, but here in New Zealand they don't work so well.
I try Apple Maps ~once in 6 months, They are definitely getting better and better, but still no comparison to Google Maps.
There could be some awkward moments in the cafeteria chatting with your workmate, who's in a neckbrace after a software glitch.
"Hey"
oh hey.
...
" YOU FORGOT THE BLODDY SEMI-COLON BRAD!!!"
If a company known to be old and slow like GM could overpay and snap up Cruise, what's stopping Apple from opening their warchest to acquire one of the many other self driving car startups that have made decent progress?
shame on you Apple, you don't need this.
https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ Google Maps's Moat - Justin O'Beirne
Only then fix Siri and then try your hand at an automated car. Maps and Siri will not kill someone. But honestly if Apple can not figure out maps or Siri how on Earth would they do a car?
Here is a great link that breaks it down compared to Google Maps. When did Apple decide the goal no longer is to be the best?
Do not even get me started on Siri. I find this defense of Apple baffling? Why is it acceptable to do a poor job at a product?
None of this is a reflection on Apple's abilities in Data Science in which they've done some outstanding work on with (a) differential privacy with iOS and (b) FaceID.
And just because the Maps and Siri teams have issues of there own doesn't mean Apple has to stop everything they are doing until it is fixed. They can walk and chew gum at the same time.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
Heck they can collect who you associate with. I quote from the document.
"When you share your content with family and friends using Apple products, send gift certificates and products, or invite others to participate in Apple services or forums, Apple may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number. "
Historically been a big Apple hardware user but have to admit less and less. Most being replaced by Google hardware. Do carry both a Pixel 2 XL and a iPhone now as just could wait no longer for Apple to fix their products.
Replaced my Mac with a Pixel Book also for example. As well as our AirPort Extremes with Google WiFi.
I find it baffling that it is now acceptable to have poor products. The Apple that I loved for so many years NEVER settled for being good enough.
Apple does use OpenStreetMap data but they barely update it.
Share-Alike: If you publicly use any adapted version of this database, or works produced from an adapted database, you must also offer that adapted database under the ODbL.
This pissed me off so much it drove me to getting a pixel 2 so I could use google maps with android auto and I am 100% happy with the decision. I tried the htc one and samsung galaxy s2 a few years ago but found them clunky and slow so i switch back to the iphone. The pixel 2 though is just as quick and intuitive as my iphone was except now I get first rate support for google services. I totally recommend you try it out.
Edit: I just got a call on my pixel 2 and it said it was a suspected spammer so i ignored and unsurprisingly it left some foreign language voicemail. Thinking about it now, I'm surprised that is the first spam call I have received since switching 2 weeks ago as I use to get those usually every day on my iphone. So extra bonus for those that hate spam calls, it looks like the pixel 2 does some pretty good spam filtering for you.
Siri may not be perfect but she’s pretty darn good and, frankly, the only trustworthy assistant on the market.
IMO, navigation is a different story. I think navigation is one area where the up-to-date accurate information matters, and it seems Google has advantages in this part, thanks to Waze and its massive geo data. Also, Apple navigation UI really needs some critical improvements, like first-person perspective.
Compared to what? A cat? Siri is worst-of-class technology in terms of voice-based assistant.
I carry both Apple's latest phone and Google's latest phone, and it would never occur to me to use Siri for a voice task other than "set timer" (so it buzzes on my watch too).
It's true that Apple is the only company playing this game that I might trust with an in-home always-connected assistant appliance like HomePod/Alexa/Google-whatever, but since Siri utterly sucks, I do not.
Edit : my point is that it is a bit childish to state that one is better than the other. We need both in order to all have a better map experience. Som in some cases, it is better to use one and in some cases better to use the other.
