The Guardian is reporting that Apple legal representatives met with California’s department of motor vehicles to discuss regulations about self-driving cars. On record, the DMV told The Guardian that “the Apple meeting was to review DMV’s autonomous vehicle regulations”. This news follows reports that Apple is searching for a private road-testing site for its ‘Apple Car’ electric vehicle project.
More interestingly, The Guardian claims to have obtained documents that suggest the Apple Car is close to leaving the lab as the project deemed ‘Project Titan’ has now an official Engineering Program Manager. When a project gets an EPM, it typically means a product is entering the next stage of development and finishing testing stages.
Welcome to the second installment of the revamped Happy Hour podcast. Today we’re talking all about cars. Apple cars. Do they exist? Well, that’s anyone’s guess at this point, but there are a lot of details that line up for this to become a possibility. The Happy Hour podcast is available for download on iTunes and through our dedicated RSS feed…
Other Silicon Valley giants are looking at autos. Google Inc. has been working on a self-driving car for years. The head of Google’s autonomous vehicle project said last year that the company aims to forge a partnership with auto makers to build a self-driving car within the next few years. A self-driving car is not part of Apple’s current plan, one of the people familiar with the project said.
This morning’s Reuters report contradicts the earlier WSJ report saying that Apple’s electric car will be autonomous.
“It’s a software game. It’s all about autonomous driving,” the source said.
That makes a lot of sense. In 5 years, many cars will have some level of autonomy built in. In 10 years, most cars will be autonomous. Every major automobile manufacturer and most big tech companies see the huge potential here and are actively investing in R&D.
Google and Tesla are the most obvious leaders in this field. Google’s Autonomous car project is well on its way. With public demonstrations already happening and Google lobbying governments for legislation to allow for autonomous driving, the groundwork is already being laid out.
Doug Field, a former Apple executive, demonstrated Tesla’s autonomous driving to me a few months ago (along with an insane 0-60mph time). Tesla expects to have at least partial autonomy in its cars within a year and its cars coming off the assembly line already have the hardware on board to do a lot of this.
Patently Apple spotted two car-related Apple patent applications, one allowing an iPhone to act as a smart-key, the other helping you locate your car when parked in a large car-park.
The smart-key idea uses a Bluetooth connection from the phone to unlock the car, which could be done either manually or via a proximity rule, unlocking your car as you approach it … Expand Expanding Close
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