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Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

There were a few ideas floating around Chinese tech blogs, of the most possible reasons are:

1. Integrate Apple Pay into Didi Chuxing apps, which is estimated to have 300MM users in China[1]. Didi currently only accepts payment with Weixin(aka WeChat) Pay and Ali Pay (aka Ant Financial Services Group, owned by Alibaba Group).

2. Massive data points for developing Apple's self-driving technology. Didi operates in 400 Chinese cities with over 11 million rides per day, and accounts for 80% private car hailing market and 99% taxi hailing market.[2]

3. And yes, investing into Chinese tech sector give them a better leverage in negotiations with the government and also like sbuccini said, association with other Didi's major investors.

[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/12/11669178/apple-invests-1-b...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didi_Chuxing

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1. Maybe partly, but 1B USD seems a lot to pay for that.

2. Self-driving is not going to happen in China the way it happens in the US. The roads are full of pedestrians, e-bikes, people breaking any sort of nominal rule or law... it's too accident prone. Plus you have the extra challenges of the politically accuracy-challenged navigation systems. No, I don't think this reason floats.

3. Maybe partly. Locking down stable long term CNY income via a one time USD investment seems like it could even be seen as long term corporate tax planning.

Re: 2;

Perhaps Apple is thinking that this is the hard part. Nailing down the most difficult areas of self driving cars will both give them the market in China/India or other areas with similar traffic, and also leaving the "easy stuff" for last, which will only need to be supplemental.

#2 sounds like San Francisco ...

You need to drive outside of the US. Try New Dehli.

SF is busy, has tourists, and asshole taxis, but is just a normal city.

Delhi has 6 lanes if fluid traffic that mixes like a stream, cows walking the wrong way, elephants, tuk tuks that have heard of this thing you call lanes and find it a silly idea, and pedestrians that show no fear and believe they are made of iron.

China can be very similar.

China traffic (even Beijing or such) is absolutely crazy compared to anywhere in the US, and I hear that India is an order of magnitude crazier.

It's not even really comparable. Anywhere in the US you at least have lanes of traffic, people driving on the right side of the road, and don't have a gazillion 1930s-looking tricycle carts weaving in and out everywhere... Scariest part to me about China traffic, everyone covers up their seatbelts so you can't use them.

Driving in China is absolutely not comparable to driving in India

Is rule of law in traffic important for self-driving cars? If self-driving cars are based on neural networks rather than on rule-based systems, do we have any kind of intuition about under what kinds of traffic circumstances they will do well?

I would imagine a (truly) self driving car wound not assert itself aggressively - but carefully - in a crowded square and would therefore not make any progress at all. A steady stream of pedestrians jay-walking, knowing that they had nothing to fear. (Or at least, believing they had nothing to fear.)

See this gif: https://i.imgur.com/loW46yj.gif

Humans have the luxury of being able to charge into an uncontrolled intersection and trusting other drivers to make room. Sure 1% of the time it's going to cause a fender-bender, but that's just what you have to do in order to get through the intersection.

There's no way that taking chances like that would fly with a self-driving car. Even though the human passenger would have done the same thing, they're still going to feel like the car company owes them for "the car's mistake" when it's involved in a collision.

On what grounds do we have that trust?

You can just as easily teach a computer to trust people to make way as you can teach it to assume people won't make way.

Yes, you could. Like I said. And like I said, good luck marketing a product that drives recklessly into a busy intersection hoping that people will move.

> Maybe partly, but 1B USD seems a lot to pay for that.

Apple has at least $216B cash on hand as of 2016 [1] and majority of them are held overseas. $1B strategic investment with all said benefits sound like a VERY GOOD deal.

> Self-driving is not going to happen in China the way it happens in the US. The roads are full of pedestrians, e-bikes, people breaking any sort of nominal rule or law... it's too accident prone.

Probably not for a long time, yes. But I would argue that's exactly why Didi's data is MORE valuable for autonomous driving modeling to be based off. As Elon famously said[2] to George Hotz about his comma.ai demo, 99% of the self-driving is easy to do. The hard part is the 1% edge cases and billions and billions of data points for engineering validation. Apple has a very aggressive timeline for their self-driving EV, buying that massive amount data from a harsh environment serves that purpose REALLY REALLY well and it's an efficient use of capital resources to achieve their goal in time.

> Maybe partly.

And lastly, it's hard to argue a ban on Apple when Apple can say to the government that hey we've investing $1B to grow millions of driver jobs and the local tech economy. It's about jobs!

[1]: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-isnt-really-sitting-o...

[2]: https://www.teslamotors.com/support/correction-article-first...

> But I would argue that's exactly why Didi's data is MORE valuable for autonomous driving modeling to be based off.

We are assuming Didi/China will allow Apple access to the data ...

Don't forget that not only is the chinese market huge, and one of the few where there's limited competition from other western companies, it's greatly positioned for the needs of rising economies. Especially if IOT takes off. If you have just become middle class in africa, asia or india you're going to buy bang-for-buck chinese appliances. That, while the west as arguing about standard and market capture, are all going to (might, at least) be fitted with cheap wifi chips in a few years.

For the second point, i wonder if there is any potential restriction on transferring this kind of data to US ...

The juxtaposition of this possible use of data by Apple (as an investor) with Chinese state-sponsored large-scale theft of technical data by security breach is wonderful.

I assume that this acquisition would also be a natural consumer of any future car technology developed by Apple

Apple didn't acquire they company, they invested in it; Didi valuation is in the 10s of billions, besides, buying them out right would have less value to Apple.

Agree with all 3. Just think the ordering would be from 3 to 1. And not just massive data points but an actual big built in customer for your self driving vehicles.

Dependable analysis.

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