What a difference a couple of weeks can make. We knew on February 5th that Apple was offering quarter-million dollar signing bonuses to Tesla engineers to persuade them to jump ship, but the idea that the company planned to make a car was just a vague rumor. Fast-forward a fortnight and it’s now being treated as established fact.
Our own exclusive reporting on the sheer range of automotive hires by Apple makes it clear that the company is, at the very least, seriously investigating the possibility, with a 1,000-strong team reportedly approved by Tim Cook. And while we need to bear in mind the cautionary note in Seth Weintraub’s piece that there’s a big difference between an R&D project and a real, live product, at this stage an Apple car seems more likely than not.
But if Bloomberg is right that Apple plans to launch a car by 2020, I think it’s important to recognize what form that car will and won’t take (spoiler: it won’t look like the above) …
Let’s start with the obvious things we can expect from an Apple Car.
Of course, it will be electric. That’s a no-brainer. It’s the direction in which the industry is headed, is fully in line with Apple’s environmental commitments and Tesla has more than demonstrated that electric cars can be every bit as exciting as their dinosaur-burning competition.
Of course, it will be beautiful. Whether Apple is targeting a sleek sportscar or practical people-carrier, the styling will be gorgeous.
Of course, it will be hi-tech. Under the hood, it will use hi-tech battery technology. Apple will, as Jeremy Horwitz argued, solve the mess of the center stack, giving us a beautiful control panel for all the in-car amenities. Perhaps it will bring its user-interface expertise to bear on some of the still-clunky controls beyond that center stack, too.
And of course, there’ll be an app for that. Tesla has already demonstrated just how beautifully you can integrate an iPhone app with the car to do everything from monitoring battery-charging to ensuring the cabin is at the perfect temperature before you get into it.
It’s also a no-brainer that Apple is working on a self-driving car. That’s the most exciting upcoming development in the automotive world, and there is no more obvious place for Apple to find the intersection of technology and the automotive arts.
Fully autonomous cars will be a fantastic thing. You’ll be able to get into your car after a long, tiring day, press the auto-pilot button, have your car ask you where you want to go, say “Home” and then spend the journey sleeping or browsing 9to5Mac on your iPad Holo (I should probably trademark that now).
But that brings us back to this 2020 business. While the progress made in self-driving cars in recent years has been incredibly impressive, there remains a vast gap between what we have seen to date and the scenario I’ve just outlined.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk3oc1Hr62g]
But what, you protest, of Google’s self-driving cars? They’re real and they’ve notched-up over 700,000 miles of incident-free, fully autonomous motoring. No-one has ever had to slap the big red Stop button on the dashboard. They even have the necessary government paperwork to make them legal. If Google can do that today, why shouldn’t Apple be able to do that five years from now?
The answer to that lays in how Google’s autonomous cars work. First, the vast majority of those miles were driven on freeways. This is the least-demanding driving task possible. There are clear lane-markings, few junctions, no pedestrians or cyclists, no railroad crossings … in short, freeways are Roads Lite.
Second, when the time came for Google to tackle the far, far trickier business of city driving, its engineers didn’t just program a computer to drive a car and then let it loose on the streets. They instead started out by creating, literally, an inch-level 3D map of a specific series of streets. Every pothole, every road sign, every painted line on the road surface–all of those details were fed into the computer model used by the car. When anything changes, the street has to be remapped before the car can drive along it.
With all of this detail in place, the car is an incredibly capable driver. It knows, when the model tells it that it’s reached a railroad crossing, that it must wait until the far side of the crossing is clear before it proceeds. It knows, when turning right, that it should allow pedestrians to cross first. It knows, when it sees a cyclist raise their left arm, that it must wait behind and allow the cyclist to change lanes.
But all of this is possible thanks to that constantly-updated, inch-level computer model of every street on which the car drives. Even in Google’s home town of Mountain View, Google has only mapped a fraction of the streets. Rolling that out to every street in the whole of the USA–all 3,980,817 miles of them–would be a massive undertaking. Keeping every single one of those miles updated every time anything changes would be an even bigger one.
Of course, eventually autonomous cars will be smart enough not to need this mapping. They will be able to use general rules and pattern-recognition to figure things out for themselves. But that level of technological sophistication isn’t here today, and isn’t going to be here in five years time. Probably not at all. Definitely not working, tested and sufficiently reliable to release into the wild. And absolutely not approved for public use by the regulatory authorities.
Now, that doesn’t mean the Apple car won’t proudly proclaim itself to have self-driving technology. There are cars today that make that claim, like Tesla’s “Autopilot.” But what that term means today is very far removed from that delicious vision of kicking back and letting the car drive us home. So, what sort of capabilities exist today?
Self-parking cars. Pull up next to an empty slot in a parking lot, or a parking space on the street, and the car can drive the last few feet into the space. Tesla is taking this a stage further, allowing the car to learn its usual parking spot at your home or work. You can get out of the car and leave it to park itself.
Lane-following and lane-changing on freeways. For years, we’ve had technology that allows a car to recognize clear lane markings and remain within that lane, adjusting speed to remain a safe distance behind the vehicle in front. We’ve more recently seen the logical extension of this: changing lanes to overtake a slower vehicle, moving back into the original lane afterwards.
Emergency braking. Cars–and even trucks–can spot an obstacle in the road and apply the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a halt to avoid a collision. Volvo has taken this a step further and programmed cars to recognize pedestrians and cyclists heading toward a road, not waiting until they actually move into the car’s path.
Speed control. Some cars can recognize speed limit signs and automatically adjust the speed of the car to comply.
Tesla demonstrated a number of these things last year. The executive summary is that today’s ‘self-driving’ cars can do a small number of very specific things well enough to form extremely useful driver aids, but they don’t come anywhere close to replacing a human driver.
So, what can we expect from Apple? Well, technology will move on, of course. Apple and others will continue to build on the existing capabilities described above, so an Apple Car will be able to do more than cars can do today. But I don’t think it will push the technology much further than other manufacturers, and I can explain why in one word: iPhone.
The iPhone revolutionized the smartphone, but it didn’t do this by adding much in the way of new technology. Touchscreen smartphones had existed for years before the iPhone. Multi-touch was really the only significant technological innovation. What made the iPhone such a ground-breaking product was not that it did anything new, but instead that it did it so well.
Smartphones were, at the time, for geeks. Apple turned them into a mass-market product. Existing manufacturers had clunky-looking smartphones; Apple created a beautiful one. Other smartphones had to be controlled with a fiddly stylus; Apple enabled us to use our fingers. Others had physical keyboards; Apple created a usable on-screen one. Others had UIs designed by geeks for geeks; Apple created one so simple that non-techy consumers could use one without instruction.
That was Apple’s strength then, and that is Apple’s strength now. Watch technology emerge. Watch what other companies do. Wait until the time is right, then do the same thing, only better. It’s what the company has done with the smartphone, the tablet, the smartwatch … and is what Apple will do with the smartcar.
So, if that 2020 date is right, that’s what I think we should expect from an Apple Car. Electric. Beautiful. Hi-tech. Great user-interface. A companion app. Some cool driver aids, probably using that self-driving terminology. But not, in five years time, anything close to a fully automomous car.
Main image: Rinspeed (XchangeE concept car based on Tesla Model S). Google car: NBCNews. Lane-change: Tesla. Final image: Volvo.
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How can an autonomous car work if there are non-autonomous cars on the road?
Watch the Google demo: the car can cope with other cars, pedestrians and cyclists.
It will work, its just at the mercy of human operated vehicles. So not much value added when your are in the one autonomous car on the road and are in a pack of 50 human vehicles on the interstate which may or may not be texting/intoxicated.
I agree there will be additional value when all cars are automated, as speeds can be higher, gaps can be smaller, etc, but in the meantime I’d definitely sign up for the car doing the work on a wet, late night drive home.
Yes it will be much like cruise control 2.0 turn it on during high speed safe open roads/ slower speed residential neighborhoods until the majority of vehicles on the road are autonomous.
Yeah just imagine the Smart car dealing with all the idiots on the road. No way anytime soon…
I would expect Apple to create free Tesla-style charging stations along America’s highways were AppleCar owners can get a free top-off, a consult at a Genius bar, and accessory purchasing opportunities. Just imagine an Apple Store every 200 miles.
:-D
That sounds a lot like Thomas Edison with his direct current generators every mile or so… And we know how that turned out for the OG Tesla.
I think Apple should work on a smart traffic light first. In a world where cars will be driving themselves, I shouldn’t have to wait at a red light when there is no traffic coming from any direction.
Those are fairly widespread in the UK, based upon personal experience! Pressure sensors in the road detect traffic to enable the green signal, which otherwise stays red and allows traffic through from other roads. Pedestrian sensors also extend the time of the red signal.
An interesting technology which is (slightly) related but (very) cool is that used by London buses. Their exact location in relation to each other and traffic signals is known, so that priority can be given to them at junctions, shortening red signals, for example.
This already exists! I believe it is often a magnet under the road that can tell when a car is waiting at the light. Obviously it’s not at every stoplight, but a lot of times you’ll see a nearly car sized rectangle where you wait. That’s where they cut out the road to place either a magnet (or as Alistair says a pressure sensor) under the street to sense cars that are waiting.
The biggest downside of Google’s self-driving car, one that is never mentioned by Google, is their LIDAR solution. It seems like a magical sensor; spinning at high frequencies to produce highly accurate 3D maps of the surrounding environment. This works great for their demos, but it wouldn’t work at all when deployed to a market of cars as these sensors interfere directly with each other.
If you had two or more Google self-driving cars in close range, their LIDAR sensors would cast lasers into each other, polluting the readings beyond usability. The only foreseeable solution is a TDMA scheme for firing your laser. This definitely doesn’t scale to every car on the road using these sensors.
Without this magic sensor, we’re left with basic cameras as our fanciest device to use, and there just hasn’t been as much progress with that technology to get us anywhere as close to full autonomy as Google has with LIDAR.
I guess if the cars can communicate with each other, for a TDMA approach, that works for a certain number of cars within a given range, but yeah, you’re going to hit a limit pretty soon.
It’s conceivable that LIDAR could be tuned to look for its own frequency of laser light. They may not be going to that expense because of the rarity of the cars, but it’s not a big technological leap. I think there are other solutions, too.
Even more communication signals. Some years ago reports arose that several cars just stopped during full traffic in the Gubrist Tunnel in Switzerland. All electronics switched off. It even happened several times to one Peugeot driver.
The cars were checked but no error or defective part was found.
According to Swiss technicians the blocked electronic occurred to electro smog from all the antennas in the tunnel (mobile phones, radar cams, surveillance cams, radio antennas etc.) all the different frequencies from these antennas are reflected like a parabol antenna to the cars electronic which just couldn’t deal with all the data. Things are even worse, by multiplexing a lot of data over a single cable, car makers avoid having 1000 of km cables in cars for every sensor. Accessing and fetching the right data in milliseconds is a horse-work for any computer. If the multiplexed data is being infiltrated by foreign signals (as in the Gubrist Tunnel) any electronic runs Amok.
(articles in German language:
http://www.autobild.de/artikel/elektrosmog-37425.html,
http://www.emf.ethz.ch/archive/var/sb_gysel_pref5.pdf (page 46))
Volvo already has the technology you said is “not possible in a 5 years time”. And in two years, 100 real costumers will be chosen to test it in real life conditions in Sweden. The whole thing is said to cost only 2,000 USD.
Sorry to disagree, but I guess that if Apple does not come with a fully self-driven car by 2020, it will be way behind other car makers.
More info here: http://www.autoblog.com/2015/02/19/volvo-self-driving-cars-2017-official-video/
“100 self-driving cars in the hands of customers on selected roads” – This is the same approach as Google: map those roads fully. That is totally different to a car that can drive you anywhere.
Yea, it’s not about the cars. It’s about the surrounding infrastructure.
My understanding of the article was that those selected roads refer to the fact that you can’t just test those things anywhere due to regulatory reasons.
At least the video suggests the car depends more on the sensors, cameras, lasers and etc. than on the mapping system.
Nope, Volvo is definitely taking the same approach as Google: “A high-definition 3D digital map provides the system with information on the road, traffic signs, guard rails, highway exits and more, accurate down to the centimeter.”
What would be very Apple like to do:
They might roll out an electric car with GPS and all the bells and whistles, and have that car have a camera on each side of it,that will start mapping everyting around it, as soon as you go faster than 5 miles per hour, so wil even 10,000 cars sold, they will almost instantly have a good road mapping from all pver the country. Google does that with GPS and your phone. search for “location History” on google, which will show your precise location every 15 min of the day. Whats to stop apple to do this with cars and cameras in them, so that they can collect as much data as possible, and by release date of Apple Car 2.0 make it self driving, as it will have all that massive mapping, inch by inch, consistently updated on road conditions, army of apple cars driving the streets.
That’s a clever idea. Basically turn every car you manufacture into an automatically updating Street View car. So once a new road is changed, the first person to encounter it helps everyone who follows.
I don’t think it would be so impossible to also have regional ground truth teams or partnerships with local governments to update the database when new things are built.
I don’t think Apple will have a ready iCar by 2020. Since many years all big car manufacturers are building self driving cars.
You only state Google and Tesla. But VW, Toyota, Audi, Renault etc. all have self driving cars since years, but they don’t make the hype of being on road anytime soon.
Why? Because the legislation is way too complicated to change to self driving computer decisions. The last decision should be done by people not a computer. I know the USA is computer crazy and they believe every decision made by computers (why do they trust computer enabled elections?, why do they trust opinions on Facebook or other social networks? Why do they trust computer decisions to catch (non-)suspects (FBI, NSA) or kill people (CIA drones)…)
A simple example: the driving laws in Europe say, that if an animal (dog, cat, deer…) crosses the street and you don’t have the possibility to break or dodge the animal, you have to run over the animal (even if that means killing it or damaging your car.)
Will Google car avoid the animal and hit the next tree? How can it make a difference between a deer and a human being with a stroller? During every bigger storm hitting Europe, people are killed by falling trees. How will a self driving car react? Full-Brake or accelerate to drive away from the falling tree? (In Terminator this may work, but our computers can’t make these decisions yet)
Plus millions of km of roads are missing signs, have sun bleached signs, are missing lane markings etc. and a lot of people don’t behave according to the street rules (don’t stop at red lights or STOP signs…) how does the computer software act here which only works for right or wrong decisions (binary system, not perhaps or in between) .
In theory everything works great and tests do prove it on prepared roads or roads with limited interactions. The technic works already but only in a perfect world.
You only have to take the new visual systems in modern cars: self parking or recognizing speed limit signs …
It is functional but not more! The next car I want to buy will have all these electronic gadgets. But as my dealer tells me: “the sign recognition only works under good conditions, bad weather spoils it. And self parking is for those who cannot park a car. If can park, you get in any parking space the car fits in. The self parking system needs much bigger park space.” (Here it’s Europe cars, parking lots and streets are much smaller than in the USA ;-))
I really would like to see an iCar, but I think it won’t be so soon if it happens at all.
You forgot all the IAPs necessary to use wipers, heat, AC or to get out of demo mode after 10km
Yes, the “IAPs.” Pick one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAP
This is a useless comment. It’s an Apple website. Everyone knows what “IAP” is..
Would you get a 100k mile warranty? AppleCar AppleCare ? And are turtle necks a requirement?
To everyone who abused me over the last few days for daring to say that Google’s auto driving cars don’t actually work … your leader has spoken. You can believe it now.
I’ll believe it when someone can, with it least something close to a specific, answer: Who’s going to build it (and where? A continent is close enough for now)? Who’s going to sell it?
this whole thing is hilarious. i have no idea what apple is thinking. something apple knows about is consumer electronics, yet they’ve been working on iTV for 5 years and still nothing. they probably could beat existing TV manufactures, once they get it out there though. Cars have orders of magnitude more parts and cost. But they’re going to compete with tesla, gm and ford? maybe gm and ford I’d believe… but if there is any company that already knows how apple designs products, it’s tesla bc they have more apple employees than from anywhere else. What is their car going to offer really in 5-10 years that tesla doesn’t have today?
With the TV, it’s not the interface or technology holding back the launch, it’s the content negotiations required with entrenched content owners/producers who don’t want to give up control of their revenue stream.
Correct. It’s really sad that people don’t under this.
Understand*
And you don’t think the auto dealers won’t fight back at Apple like they did with Tesla? You’re dreaming!!
@pbardet Tesla is a small company. With Apple’s money, Apple can break into any business if they want to… it’s something completely different, because the car manufacturers do not own the roads or something, yet NBC owns the content…
Apple has repeatedly moved into unfamiliar industries and, through technical know-how, genius design decisions, and supply chain mastery, assimilated the best and improved upon the flaws.
1) The first prototype iPhone, I believe, was a landline hooked up to a Power Macintosh G3. And once they figured out how the thing worked at a fundamental level, they went about solving all the UI, design, and experience problems people encounter (eg Visual Voicemail, Multitouch, Home button to escape, rotation sensor, etc).
2) They arguably did the same thing with the Watch. Consulted the experts, drew inspiration from good existing products, and created new technologies to solve problems (annoying vibration? Tactic engine. Thought to control a tiny screen? Digital Crown). The watch arguably has many of the best strap types gathered in one place, with a clever interchangeable system.
3) What will the Apple Car offer that Tesla isn’t? I feel like that’s holding up the RAZR as the epitome of cell phone technology in 2006 and wondering how we can go any further.
There must be potential in using remote sensing to provide these inch-perfect models of the road, which can then be transmitted to the car, which is essentially just a dumb terminal receiving the information. Obviously not within five years, more like fifty, but taking the smarts out of the car would make the technology far more accessible.
I think people are underestimating what technology is able to…
Not convinced that Apple will produce a car, self-driving or not, but self-driving doesn’t have to be anywhere-to-anywhere. Maybe you drive to an entry into a fully-mapped route, like a freeway on ramp, and let the car handle driving from that point. Large-scale destinations like malls, arenas, airports, large employers, apartment complexes and even some new home subdivisions can have lanes and routes designed and mapped for SD cars. In those cases, the car takes you to the curb, you get out, and then the car self-parks and locks while you walk into your destination.
Consider an alternate business model: Apple designs a car, then cuts a deal with an automaker to manufacture and sell it, paying Apple a royalty for each unit sold. It would be similar to the arrangement they have with telcos. There are plenty of car companies outside the U.S. that would be happy to make their first entrant into that market an iCar. Likewise for China, where the Apple brand is even more golden, and the car market is far larger.
The downside is that becoming a car manufacturer or aligning closely with one company could hurt the CarPlay and iPhone integration support in their competitors’ models, so maybe the iCar wouldn’t be an exclusive deal with just one company.
This would allow Apple to focus on the profitable segments, which is how they roll. So I’ve convinced myself that it’s feasible.
Apple is already ahead of the game… it’s only a matter of time they reveal avionics engineers… they’re building the first autonomous street legal (in this case no need for streets) flying car that can land vertically…after all, what did SJ say? “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
I don’t think that an autonomous car can prevent an accident with a human-driven car. The idea of cars driving autonomously is a crazy-sounding idea that is decades away from being used as a non-proof-ofconcent real-life consumer vehicle.
The fact that Goole is heavily investing in this technology means absolutely nothing. Google invests in a bunch of projects with most of them eventually being discontinued. The way Google operates is they require that every engineer spends 20% of their time on a personal project approved by the manager. Some of these personal projects go nowhere, but others get traction with Google investing money in the idea and building a team around it. This has been happening for a decade now. Not much has come out of this; name one Google product outside of Search/Gmail that is widely used. Name one business model outside of advertising that earns Google any significant income. There is nothing to name.
Google is a large advertising agency built by geeks who came up with a brilliant search algorithms. Google has been milking this golden cow for over a decade now by selling ads. Because geeks are still running the company, they are very much interested in investing billions in high-tech research. That’s all the self-serving car is about – investing billions in a research project.
As for the latest rumors of Apple building a car team, this is more likely to be the beginning of the closer integration with and future acquisition of Tesla than it is about building a self-driving car. Fortunately, Apple says “no” 1,000 times for each ‘yes,’ whereas Google says “yes” almost as often as it says “no’.
No not what say, you do.
Sorry, yoda misspelled, right?
Correct. Autonomous driving, if it EVER becomes the norm, is a ridiculous long way off…for no better reason than there is simply no interest in it from the general public.
There seem to be quite a few people that spend their day reading tech articles that have a completely different and artificial view of reality. People, in general, are not ready to give up driving for automata. They won’t cooperate with it, will generally shoot it down across the board.
I say its at least decades away because the only hope of it EVER becoming the norm is when an entirely new generation of people come into existence. Maybe 2 – 3 more generations. Technology has nothing to do with it.
My god you spew misinformation like religious doctrine. If you’re going to state these presumptions (as that’s all they are), please at least try to back them up with empirical evidence.
Right, and who needed horseless carriages or flying machines or computers or cellular phones before they were popular? Things go from “impossible” to “commonplace” in about 10 years.
Congrats to 9to5mac for breaking open this story from minor rumor to an information-loaded, nearly established fact. 9to5mac has done an amazing just b over the last several years in terms of reporting. Have their been misses? Of course. But in contrast, the WSJ has been an amazing error-filled rumor mill on the same level as the Daily Mail. Actually, the WSJ has been a few steps behind the Daily Mail in the tech category.
On the whole no one is driving tech news as quickly and as accurately as 9to5mac. Kudos to you, and keep going strong.
Concerning mapping every road everywhere, just one word: drones.
Well, I will monitor all this from heaven, maybe hell.
At Apple, design always wins over reliability or functionality. This is why iPhones look beautiful but can be destroyed even if they get slightly damp and often break when they are dropped. So what happens when Apple builds a car. Will they go all in on safety, and make it look like a Volvo or will they build an elegant beautiful sexy death trap?
Tesla has the highest safety rating of any car in history. Does it look like a Volvo to you? An electric car without a combustion engine and the need for the associated center stack, drivetrain, etc., opens up a ton more design options that allow for both style and structural integrity.
Apple’s car is not autonomous for the simple reason that they are not so delusional as to believe autonomous driving is going to take off anytime in the next 5, 10, or 30 years.
They’re smarter than people that know nothing about it.
Does the Apple car not come with heaters and tinted windows? Maybe they do not know how to use the Nest thermostat. (Turtlenecks and sunglasses)
For that matter, they are watching TV. Where are the VR glasses?
It would be interesting to see one of these cars in the Daytona 500. Would it understand when to draft and when not to and sideforce and when it needs to run the low line instead of the high line because of grip?
I wonder if anyone knows what you’re talking about.
I imagine this will be an evolutionary thing. The smarter all cars get, the closer we will be to fully autonomous driving. I could see roads being designed to be easier for self-driving cars. They could add sensors to the road that cars can use to increase safety and avoid road designs that are more challenging to drive. Maybe these cars will even be able to use streetcar or trolley bus lanes and pull electric power off a trolley wire to charge.
Let’s be real here. Apple couldn’t launch a viable music streaming service on their own. They had to pay a few billion dollars to buy a company that manufactures crappy headphones but has a viable music streaming service. Apple tried to create a social media hub – what was it called again? I can’t even remember the name now. It failed miserably and was discontinued. Does anyone seriously think Apple can build an electric self-driving car on their own? It’s completely outside of the realm of possibility. Why even bother? Apple has close to $200 billion in the bank. There’s an amazing company that is making the most advanced electric cars. Their CEO adores Steve Jobs. The Tesla employees adore Elon Musk. The writing is on the wall. If Apple is interested in making the most advanced electric car, this will be done through acquisition. Elon Musk doesn’t have to agree to this. Theres’ such a thing as a hostile takeover. Apple has plenty of cash to make an offer to Tesla shareholders that they cannot turn down.
Facebook paid $19 billion for an app – WhatsApp. Give me a break! Apple can pick up Tesla for $60 billion tomorrow if they want to. Definitely worth the investment.
Why is Apple hiring a team of automotive experts? Well, think hostile takeover again. If Elon Musk and the upper management refuse to cooperate on the acquisition of Tesla by Apple and decide to walk away, Apple will have their own management team of automotive experts in place to take over Tesla operations once the hostile takeover is completed.
Oh dear dear dear lord. Conspiracy theorists out in full force.
Right. Apple tried to outdo Google Maps. Years later, Apple Maps is still a disaster. Perhaps not in California, but definitely on the East Coast. It got me lost many times. It got my wife lost more often. Once it told her to park and hike through a ravine with dense forest to get to an adjacent parking lot of a school. The POIs on Apple Maps are in wrong places more often than they are in right places. There’s no live traffic that re-routes you based on traffic conditions – of if there is one, it is definitely not working in the metro area where I live, which is a huge area populated by 5 million people. Google Maps is amazing. Live traffic and lane guidance is unbelievable. Live re-routing based on the changing traffic conditions – no one can do this better than Google Maps. Frankly, I don’t think Apple is even trying any longer. They pretty much realize they lost this one to Google.
Tim Cook must know this. Do you think he will try to outdo Tesla at building an electric and hope Apple can beat Tesla? Really? Apple has no competency in building cars. This is the time for you to counter with the iPhone example. Don’t forget one thing – Steve Jobs was driving the iPhone project. Apple worked on a mobile device for over a decade before they made it into the most advanced phone on the planet and released it into the wild. There was nothing around them that was worthy acquiring, and they didn’t have much money to acquire anything.
It’s now a completely different environment. There’s no more Steve Jobs. Apple has close to $200 billion in the bank. Tesla is headquartered next door and is relatively cheap compared to how much cash Apple currently has. And finally, Wall Street is screaming at Apple to do something with that ridiculous amount of cash. Apple really needs to show Wall Street that there’s a vision for the future and they will use the cash they have been accumulating to acquire the technology that will provide them with decades of high profits.
The writing is on the wall. There will not be a car built in house by Apple. That’s for sure. That would be a complete waste of time and resources. By the time Apple creates such a car, Tesla, BMW, and others will own the market.
Right now, Apple’s best bet for the next big thing is Apple Watch. Weather or not this will materialize into a serious revenue stream is unclear. They really do need another product line that will guarantee high profitability in the next decade. With high-end high-margin electric cars, one cannot go wrong.
Hahah, I honestly don’t even feel like using energy to respond to this, but oh well.
First of all, Google Maps has so many inaccuract business locations it’s unreal. I checked my local area and it’s just sad how few are in the correct locations. Apple’s is more accurate for my location in respect to that. I will say that, this is my location, ergo I don’t dare to extrapolate that to say that Apple’s is better than Google’s, because I think rationally. Whilst, my location is better on Apple, 90% of the world could be more accurate on Google. The thing is, you don’t bother to acknowledge this, you just ignore anything that isn’t relavant to your location.
When did Tesla begin? Apple has more money (by far), than any company on Earth. They can do whatever they choose to do, namely because of this, and the fact that they can hire the talent that they need. You may need to reread this article, or actually read anything concerning this rumor over the last purple weeks. Apple has been hiring tons of people that specialize in everything to do with automotive engineering, etc. Apple doesn’t need to acquire Tesla, and they wouldn’t dream of squiring Tesla if their vision is different than theirs, it would make absolutely no sense.
Yes everything Apple does is because of Wallstreet breathing down their necks. HAHAHA what a joke. They will build a car, and you’re highly mistaken, it will be right in time to destroy the others. This is when it’s heating up, it’s not there. By the way, pretty sure everything Apple has made, came to market after others already owned it, and they then destroyed those.
I also expect that such car will be slower at each upgrade, that it will start with a nice 3D interface and suddenly will jump to a flat one while not improving the speed at all. It will be advertised as 200 miles range, but even though I only drive 40 a day, I will have to plug it every night.
I believe that there is credence to all the Apple Car talk. Poaching major names in the car industry and building a team that consists of 1,000 people is too big a of project to be focused on niche products like CarPlay or their mapping technology. However, releasing a car by 2020 is sketchy at best. Many techies and media outlets insisted that the Apple Watch would be released by Valentine’s Day. Lo and behold, the date was incorrect.
My major interest is how Apple will try to avoid car-related deaths. Of course, the easy answer would be a ‘driverless’ vehicle. But that seems unlikely even 5 years from now. It’s strange to imagine that there will be a first person to die in a car made by Apple. How would it happen? When? Why? Would there be recalls? How would the company respond? It’s easy for us to imagine this sort of thing happening in a car made by any other manufacturer because they are faceless giants, and we’ve been inundated by news stories of cars malfunctioning. But people hold Apple to a very high standard. Would Apple
just become another faceless giant when the death toll starts rising?
Lastly, it is really hard to imagine Apple selling their vehicles on traditional car lots. So I’m wondering how people will shop for these vehicles. Will they be purchased online? How will people get a chance to test drive an Apple Car? Will Apple work in conjunction with auto dealerships? I would not want to buy an Apple Car from a slimy car salesman. Sadly, though, I would buy any other make of vehicle from a slimy car salesman. But that goes back to holding Apple to a higher standard.
I first thought that the Apple Car is beeing designed for the next IPhone 8. I am really surprised that this will be a real car for the roads. I don;t drive, so for myself it isn;t interesting.
You won’t need to drive, it’ll be largely autonomous. At least in 10 years.
The creative question that needs to be answered is how do they use the technology available, understand it’s potential and its limitations, to come up with something people haven’t thought of before.
A limited application example is a car that can park for you at home or work…. but also at just at airports, train stations, and shopping centres. Another would be to self-drive from a restaurant to a nearby charging location (to charge) and back. Or simply to move out of the way at a charger if another car requests access.
I also think that we should consider whether every mechanical connection from the driver to the car should be considered unnecessary – since when it’s driven autonomously that mechanical connection isn’t used. Obviously the accelerator is just an input device sending a command to the electric motor, the brake similarly controls the electric motor and a brake pad, most of the steering assembly may be unnecessary. The steering interface really is just a controller.
Apple doesn’t need to have self driving cars to do some amazingly innovative things.
What they should do, instead of having to remap the streets, is have little boxes every 50 yards with information and safety concerns for the specific area that sends the data to the car. So if there is a pothole the box can send that information to the car which will then avoid it.
now it will be easier for someone with intent to steal on the road or street, stand in front of you car to stop…
The Apple car is targeted for 2020, so 2021 or 2022 is probably a more likely timeframe for release, based on experience with Apple products. Whenever it’s ready, though, expect it to immediately make everything before it obsolete. Don’t by a new car until the Apple car is ready.
Apple waits for all the technologies to be in place before introducing the breakthrough product that can exploit them. What isn’t ready now will be made ready by Apple and its partners in time for release. They’ll be sure to develop some key technologies on their own that competitors won’t have access to and will need years to copy.
5, 6, 7 years from now? It’ll be fully self-driving, have fuel cells to generate power and lightweight batteries to hold enough charge to make long distance drives practical, be wirelessly connected to the internet and other Apple cars, and use a totally different design that fully takes advantage of all these features for the best possible passenger experience.
When I see one running on the 101 between the San Fernando valley and Los Angeles around 4:30-5:00PM any weekday then I’ll believe they’ve got something useful!
I don’t know this road, but generally driving on a freeway in slow conditions is one of the more easily accomplished possibilities, able to be done now (almost!).
It doesn’t involve traffic lights, cross streets, kids/dogs/pedestrians running out. It’s probably well marked. All the car really has to do is stay in the current lane and maintain a distance from the car in front. (Yes there’s more to it, but much easier than some other areas).
Hey Ben! I am not sure are you going to read this or not, but if you do, let me give you a piece of… suggestion haha. Why don’t you (you might already) keep that article and try to remember (you know, cause it’s easy…) in 5 years to reopen it and re-write it. Of course, updated and compared to the 2020 surrounding. That would be amazing comparison! And of course, it would be so cool if 9to5mac is still around, you too in that matter… oh, that would be a blast! P.S. At the end it’s “automomous”, just saw it. :) Great article again, I really enjoyed it! Bests! :)
Thanks, Ilko, I’m sure it will be fun to compare against any reality :-)
people camping for months in front of dealers to buy it
One thing that I was alway impressed about with the GPS devices in Korea was just how detailed the information was. I mean for example we are driving in a parking lot for my in-law’s apartment complex and the GPS chimes out detail like “Speed bump ahead”. So I do think that there will be that kind of detail and more with integrated sensors and the lot to be able to keep the whole thing updated from the information from other Apple Cars.
My only concern is the data connection of these cars, I really hope that work and be reliable even when there is limited connectivity, especially on long mountainous highways of the West coast of NA where signal can easily drop to zero bars.