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Comment by greglindahl | Hacker News Reader

Apple's stuck in an interesting place:

If Apple is going to produce cars, other car companies don't want to cooperate with them. CarPlay, sure, but not much else.

If Apple isn't going to produce cars, it's still a tough market for autonomous driving software. The biggest car companies are doing their own in-house, there are several independent companies already working on it, and car companies may end up just buying that software from the same vendors that they buy things like adaptive cruise control from.

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I honestly don't think Apple is working on a car. Rather, I think Apple is building a more involved (than CarPlay) technology platform for vehicles where they deliver the whole experience and car manufacturers essentially become the next phone carriers. I think the whole narrative about Apple building an actual car is just to distract from the real thing they're building.

I hear you, but Apple isn't known for developing in this way. Their focus is on controlling the entire experience, hardware to software. Still, anything is possible

The iPhone evolved from the iPod, but it's harder to see obvious early footholds in the automobile industry. High-end consumer, or fleet vehicles with a well specified use maybe?

Car companies already cooperate closely with Apple to ensure that bluetooth works well with iPhones. CarPlay is the next step forward. So there are 2 footholds already.

Still a Big jump from CarPlay to an actual car though.

Building cellphone hardware is much less complicated at scale than building a car, though. Tesla has been at it for a while now and they still have quality problems (though apparently that's gotten better lately?) and there hasn't been a profitable new entrant in like .... 50 years?

they are. i know a guy on a self driving car team at apple

If that's true, I'm fairly sure that he:

1. Should not have told you that.

2. Is not happy about you saying something about it.

This leads me to believe that you don't actually know this person.

Even if this were true (which, I'm skeptical about), just because they have autonomous hardware and a "self-driving car team", doesn't mean that's the product that they will put on the field.

Look at it this way. If you're building a software platform for autonomous vehicles, then you're going to need to do some (or a lot) of R&D in autonomous hardware, but that doesn't necessarily mean that autonomous hardware is the ultimate product.

Why not? As a hardware-centered platform company, car is obviously the next computing platform.

Or perhaps Apple plans to make the cars, but not sell them. What if they plan to remain the owner, but sell transportation as a service to the masses? Entirely autonomous, and Apple owns the fleet.

In the grand scheme of things this is probably where the biggest opportunity is, but I don't think Apple is in the best position to take advantage of this. Tesla and Uber are probably in the best positions. Tesla because they have their software already in the field learning (autopilot), and Uber because they already have the network for transport as a service.

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