Apple receives permit in California to test self-driving cars
uk.reuters.com
uk.reuters.com
A more recent example is the telepresence robot. Many entries, but still more Newton than iPhone.
With Apple, it's easy to pick out their winners and losers: iPhone, iMac, MacBook, ... vs, Apple TV, Lisa, Newton, ....
At their current scale, Apple needs to enter really big markets in order to move the needle on sales and profits. There aren't many really big tech markets left. Cars are an interesting play in that it combines robotics and consumer tech, and puts them into a market that has room for multiple large players and plenty of opportunity for disruption. The transition to an electric drive train and autonomous navigation presents an entry point. There will be multiple winners.
Global GDB is estimated to be at around 80 trillion $.
The only device significantly ahead of it in sales is the Roku (Amazon and Google's sticks are ~the same number of sales as Apple TV).
But the market is pretty evenly split in sales and Apple still maintains one of the larger overall install bases for any of them (not the outsized winner it used to be there though of course).
"Not being a de-facto monopoly" is hardly a loss.
Chromecast cannot possibly be considered usable by most because it follows a weirdo, google-style, controlled-by-the-browser (but only Chrome) model. It is the most absurd way to watch TV ever invented. I use it sometimes, sure, because it's the only Linux-friendly HDMI dongle (Chrome runs on Linux), but can't imagine anyone actually liking it.
Apple TV, in comparison, is tightly integrated into every MacOS and iOS device, i.e. not only into the OS but often into the applications that run on them. And I don't remember anyone offering a free ATV to me... :)
Everything I use for media support Chromecast on both iOS and Android (Spotify, Pocket Casts, Netflix, Youtube, etc) Chrome supports to videos in websites. I'd say most times I go to see if an android app has Chromecast support, it does. I'm not sure how much that's true of iOS apps. I'd guess it's less.
Google home integration is really nice too. I can tell Google home to play something on the Chromecast.
I've worked in places with Macs + Apple TVs in conference rooms, and Airplay was definitely more annoying than Chromecasting.
Maybe you should have considered that before engaging in a conversation about devices tightly integrated with Android.
I wish that more tablet and phone apps supported it. But then I always have the browser fallback when they don't.
Apple TV is OK and I have one. But I prefer to display stuff the way I'm already accustomed to doing so and then cast it to my TV when I want to.
This only makes sense if you completely disregard the fact that almost all the major VOD providers (excepting Amazon Prime Video) provide Chromecast support in their Android and iOS apps. It's extremely convenient for me; open the app, cast to the TV, and select the video.
I love my AppleTV and got it free from pre-paying my DIRECTV Now app for 3 months. It was a no brainer for me.
Even if I open a torrent file on my laptop, it automatically starts streaming to the Chromecast.
I'm honestly suprised that someone dares to say that the Chromecast isn't successful/usable
Ps. I have 3 Chromecasts and 1 Chromecast audio
Wait, what? How did you set this up?
The arguments are the default ones, that are triggerd when you "Open With" - Choose a program. You receive a filename
Then run a new console, which runs castnow ( https://github.com/xat/castnow ). And voila
PS. Can choose the wrong chromecast when there are 2 devices in the network :p
I'm totally aware that it's basically just a fancy HDMI cable but we can easily cast from three operating systems, plus all our phones and tablets. I don't want a device any smarter than this, with menus and libraries of stuff it wants me to buy. The Chromecast model works great for us.
Roku had $400 million in revenue in 2016[1] which includes content share while Apple TV produced a billion dollars of revenue back in in 2013 [2]. And Apple's margins are way higher than Roku's. Apple TV, while a self described 'hobby' by Apple (presumably when compared to iOS/Mac), was and still is a very successful product in a category it basically invented.
There is a 0% chance that I would ever purchase a car from Apple with their self driving functionality in it.
We recently had issues with a whole bunch of rejections of our app for reasons that are not clearly defined in their guidelines (allegedly they were "new terms" [not documented]... they pointed me to official documents that didn't match what they were telling me). The functionality that they were rejecting our app for initially wasn't new, followed by several rejections for functionality that had been in the app for nearly 2 1/2 years and had approved numerous times over that span.
I've been waiting almost a month for a phone call that they promised me "within 3 business days" to discuss the App Review issues, and have yet to receive it.
While I think that Apple creates some great hardware, and their end user support is likely better than their B2B support (which is IMHO atrocious, unless you're buying more hardware from them), there is no chance I would put my life in the hands of their product or expect them to provide me with safe travel.
I'm sure you are very frustrated, but this comment really doesn't make sense to me.
I would tend to think of an apple car as hardware, which you admit is good. And it's probably being driven by apple software, which is sometimes iffy and buggy and downright crappy. I can't imagine a world where your argument makes sense because 3rd party/app story complaints really have nothing to do with this.
It feels like a total non sequitur to me. I'm not going to flag you, but I am going to downvote.
In this situation, a self driving car is a combination of hardware and software. As you said:
> it's probably being driven by apple software, which is sometimes iffy and buggy and downright crappy
Whether it rolls well is one thing, but I question the consistency of the software from them, as well as their consistency on policies (app rejections)
It sounds like you have a beef with Apple, but frankly, I want my automaker to be overly cautious with 3rd party apps. Can you imagine the Android model applied to self driving cars?
I don't know that I can fault them for feeling frustrated with Apple's support. The number of times that things have been made obsolete by Apple after just a couple of years doesn't lend a lot of confidence to the thought of a vehicle purchase that you may wish to own for 10+ years.
I'm guessing service on Teslas is the usual: brake pads every century given that regenerative braking does most of the work, greasing bearings every now and then, coolant, tires, wipers. Internal combustion is extremely complicated in comparison.
I'd consider buying self-driving features on a regular car. Electric would be a total deal-breaker for me with today's technology.
Edit: upon further reflection I think it's likely that Apple is just developing the self driving tech and is unlikely to be actually planning to build cars, electric or otherwise.
For Apple and Google, the case is clear: if they want to defend their incredibly valuable gatekeeper position for local search (the market formerly known as the yellow pages) they need to provide the UI for the car or else they lose much of that gatekeeping. The question is, will any car manufacturers be willing to play, or are they all trying to succeed where Nokia failed?
Also there's nothing routine I do at the Apple Store that requires me to wait any significant amount of time. Anytime I have a question, or want to buy something, or pick up an online order the service could hardly be any more prompt.
The only thing I have to wait for is the Genius Bar, and if I schedule in advance I don't usually wait very long. And I only have to do that when something actually breaks.
When my car breaks I generally have to schedule something in advance as well.
I've heard this repeatedly over the years. There are ALWAYS new markets. You just have to look in the right places, or wait for new pareto frontiers to open up.
Wait, what's a laptop? What's a workgroup server? What's email? None of those things had really happened, they were all markets just over the horizon about to explode onto the scene.
This was in Spring, 1987.
Of-course dad didn't listen and went on to have a unremarkable career as a Structural Engineer.
A real shame as I'm sure he would have made an excellent programmer. I like to tease him over what-ifs - especially as he shares a birthday with Bill Gates.
People just want different software every few years, because fashion is fickle there's a natural feeling that old stuff is out of date. Slack doesn't provide any real improvement over an IRC server that keeps its logs around, but it's web-based and it has custom emojis, so...
Granted, most of the things you would come up with are currently infeasible due to technological or scientific prerequisites not being available yet, but many of them are also in the realm of "possible, but no one has figured it out yet".
You know of course that this statement has been uttered for a couple thousand years.
Self-driving. Apple Maps.
No employee wants to leave Tesla to work at Apple. No consumer wants to buy a car made by Apple. Hopefully Tim and the gang won't blow through too much money before they accept that.
They're pretty good at making phones and computers. They might want to focus on keeping that reputation in the meantime.
Why not? Have you seen it?
Phones are toys. Cars kill people and are highly regulated.
Mis-using vehicles while operating on the road is illegal.
Cars are far more tightly regulated both for end-users and for manufacturers.
However, people use cars across broad use cases. Some just commute, but some drive in snow, some need to ford small streams in emergencies, some need to install roof racks, and some want car-seats for infants.
I don't see Apple designing for broad use cases, because it isn't in their culture. And that will be a problem, because cars are not toys that you can choose not to use without large consequences.
I'm not saying it won't work out, but I don't think their plan is manufacturing cars. Maybe it's just licensing the self driving tech along with the infotainment system.
Is Apple an entity with knowledge that it accumulates, develops, and applies or are people who work on and hold key positions in projects the ones that bring forth knowledge, develop it and apply it?
Is company's know-how separate from people working on it, and are people the ones who (can) bring it into the company or are people coming to the company and applying company's knowledge? What happens if either lacks - can a company bring in (group of) knowledge and can a company bring in (a group) of talent without (much) knowledge?
Cases can be made for both, I guess. So, there's no straight answer.
The thought of bringing in 95% new-hires to work on a project in which your company has no experience... I mean, why?
If the primary motivation is money, without sufficient passion, good luck competing with Tesla - where they live and breath electric cars.
In the context of my comment, Tesla's answer to "why" was a bit more inspiring than "we need to enter a new market because our existing markets are saturated"
> Your reasoning is excellent.
Jamie Carlson (ex-Tesla autopilot)
Megan McClain (ex-Volkswagen)
Vinay Palakkode (Carnegie Mellon automated driving)
Xianqiao Tong (computer vision at Nvidia)
Paul Furgale (Autonomous systems lab at SFIT)
Sanjay Massey (automated vehicles, Ford)
Stefan Weber (Bosch video based driver assistance)
Lech Szumilas (Delphi computer vision researcher)
Doug Betts (global quality lead at Fiat)
Johann Jungwirth (head of R&D at Mercedes)
Mujeeb Ijaz (Ford electrical battery cell specialist)
Nancy Sun (VP electrical engineering at electric motorcycle company Mission Motors)
Mark Sherwood (VP powertrain systems engineering at Mission Motors)
Eyal Cohen (VP software Mission Motors)
Jonathan Cohen (director of Nvidia's deep learning group)
Chris Porritt (Tesla VP of vehicle engineering and chief engineer at Aston Martin)
Alex Hitzinger (Technical Director of Porsche LMP1)
Cool.
Like Steve Zadesky before them: http://businessinsider.com/apple-steve-zadesky-quits-2016-1
Re: the Tesla names (biased article, but fun): http://marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-heres-why-we-call-app...
The profile of Jonathan Ive in the New Yorker last year made it pretty clear that he was interested in the car because he hates his car. But tbh: car manufacturers are primarily interested in "financial reasons" for making cars. That's called being in business.
It's interesting that your original premise has now been refuted:
> The only problem is that Apple doesn't have sufficient drive, talent, or reputation, in the auto industry to actually make and sell a good car. No employee wants to leave Tesla to work at Apple.
Apple demonstrably has talent from around the auto industry, with reputations which suggest they might be capable of building a good car, and people have left Tesla to join them.
So you're now changing your argument to "well maybe they can hire people, have the reputation, have the drive, and persuade consumers that they want to buy a car from Apple, but those employees have to talk to dumb computer execs!"
I must have forgotten all about Elon Musk's background in automotive manufacturing which makes him uniquely equipped to build an electric self-driving car compared to someone like Tim Cook.
Honestly the arguments you're making are so absurd that they border on the infantile.
[citation needed]
No consumer wanted to buy a phone from Apple either. Until they made one.
The problem is that most big markets are small at start.
Aren't there models to enter many smaller markets , like a VC , but instead of just supplying capital, the big company will also supply some key tech/knowledge/resources advantages, maybe some that are specialty developed for startups , all for equity?
Profitable and doing billions of dollars of revenue a quarter.
Losers?
Revenue = Asymco estimate. Apple lumps it into the "Other" category in its reporting. Horace estimated that it was doing $3bn of revenue a year in 2015. Maybe it's still just a $3bn a year business and not a $4bn a year business, but the point remains that calling it a "loser" is nuts.
If you would really like to advance the state of the art for self driving technology, I invite you come up to the mid-west, especially in the winter months, and make your toys work under those conditions.
Working up here will push your technology quite far, with snow, slush, worn away lane markers, cold temperatures, wind, potholes, washboard roads, ice, clogged sensors, blocked GPS, and any number of the above challenges thrown together in random and unpredictable patterns.
If you can get to level 4 or 5 automation in those conditions, making them work in the eternally sunny portions of CA will be a snap.
Sincerely, a Montanan (who is annoyed they had to deal with snow, ice, blocked sensors, and cold temperatures just this morning)
There's such an amazing cultural comparison to be made between I-70 over Vail pass (in Colorado) and I-80 over Donner pass in California.
Vail pass rarely closes and is open for vehicle traffic in blizzard-like conditions - but you're on your own. You'd better be well prepared and be the competent driver of a well-maintained, capable 4WD vehicle.
And so, in a blizzard, Vail pass will be nearly empty and the occasional driver will be well-equipped for the trip.
In California, they enforce chain control on I-80 for all vehicles. This has the (amazing, stupefying) perverse outcome of allowing everyone to drive over Donner pass in a blizzard. Further, they are emboldened by the chains to drive quite poorly in conditions they have no idea of how to drive in.
The result is, during a full-blown blizzard, I was driving next to some moron in a RWD camaro trying to bob and weave through slower moving traffic. Dense traffic. Dense traffic largely made of other rear wheel drive cars operated by drivers with no snow driving experience.
California.
If you really need to understand why car companies will not take your advice, you should look at their sales numbers. Car companies don't sell many cars in Montana. They sell a lot of cars in urban concrete jungles and suburbs like those that exist in California and basically every major city. Solve one major city (especially one with hills like San Francisco), and you've likely solved most major cities, worldwide.
California has 14.5 million cars registered and 2 million new cars are sold in the state each year. There aren't even 14.5 million people in Montana. It's an incredibly easy market to "disrupt" as it were, and they have people in California that are known early adopters to lean on for buying, testing and validating their product. The people of countryside and similar locales are recalcitrant and will see products like these as extraneous, "taking their jobs" and "killing their freedom of driving."
So once they've tackled the low hanging fruit market of California, maybe they might consider expanding into the harsher wilds. But, similar to public transit, the infrastructure worth investing in is infrastructure most people will use, and unfortunately that is not a self-driving Ford F-150.
Signed, Common Business Sense.
So the rational path here is to launch in moderate temperature areas with beta software and eventually refine the tech to operate in adverse condition areas.
Pushing or expecting perfection from the beginning is how thousands of products have died before launching.
The best way to do product development is getting it out of the door as early as possible (in a reasonably safe state) with a competent subset of early adopter users and if possible in an idealized environment/use case. From there you expand and heavily capitalize marketing.
This is what Facebook did when they launched in Harvard and restricted it to only Ivy-league schools. Before slowly expanding to other universities and then the public at large. They called it the bowling pin strategy.
"If your project doesn't experiment first your entire project will be an experiment" - Joe Armstrong (creator of Erlang)
I think the snow question is a good one.
Expecting them to get it right everywhere at launch time is a bad idea.
yes, car companies know about snow. and i'm sure they'll solve it when they're ready to. Problems aren't typically tackled by solving every aspect at once, and the fact that nobody is demonstrating anything outside of perfect conditions in southern california should tell you a lot about the state of the technology.
Edit: http://ns.umich.edu/new/multimedia/videos/23020-u-m-opens-mc...
And more recent investment: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dougnewcomb/2016/07/27/michigan...
Kasich proudly mentions he signed it to create barriers to driving automation.
There are parts of the Midwest that are more inhospitable to driving automation than just the weather.
They know how manufacture in scale. They know how build a vertical product. They have the cash to do it and they have a strong brand.
But most importantly, if the world moves to a car-sharing car-hailing model of autonomous cars. Ultimately, it becomes a consumer mobile play. This is where both Google and Apple own that experience. Siri will know where you are and when you need a car. This is something both Lyft and Uber wont be able to compete with.
Something tells me shipping your phones off to be built by other people in China and building your own auto assembly factories from scratch are two completely separate things.
My hobby is metal machining. Precision is a matter of understanding the physics of what you're doing, knowing your machines, and, well, the machines.
I can give you close to 0.0001 tolerances with the machine in my apartment (about 6-7 times better than stock cheap mills that haven't been properly tuned, depending on the material). Use a big, rigid, production-oriented machining center built for it, and you can do better.
I can't build you a car, though. Precision has nothing to do with this.
> But Apple could easily hire 10-20 people from car industry to fill the missing gap and get there in 5-6 years.
Something tells me you haven't been part of a project that involved mass production, complex engineering (not software-engineering; engineering), or regulatory compliance.
If I were to guess, I'd say Apple has already hired at least 10-20 automotive industry lawyers, just to get moving on just the regulatory side of it.
Any auto made in the last 20 years is incredibly complex. The biggest advancement has been hiding all that complexity.
I have swapped engines and welded cars together, so this is coming from experience. Every car has many sensors, sometimes more than 100. All these sensors feed into enormously complex software state machines written to do all calculations on a RTOS in bounded time and in a verifiably correct manner. This complexity started in, but doesn't stop at, the engine.
You are vastly underestimating the effort needed to duplicate a modern car. There have been times where I've sat for several minutes just marveling at the complexity and beauty of small parts I can hold in my hand. Some of them were surely a years work for an engineer. On any car there are thousands of these clever little parts. For roughly 20k you're buying a product of many thousands of years worth of work.
What we've seen so far from the inside of various ECUs is that they are definitely not always operating in a 'verifiably correct manner', in fact, it's hard to say for sure if the mess of code has had any review or QA imposed on it at all. You'd think so but then it would have looked a bit better.
Electric cars would/could be vastly simpler. Simpler if they don't over engineer the vechicles. The current electric vechicles do nothing for me. I hate vechicles that I can't work on.
My hope is Apple builds a simple, open source, except the assisted driving, vechicle. A vechicle that a weekend mechanic could work on? Something like a 80's Toyota. Just a people mover, that lasts.
My fear is they will build a mac book pro on wheels. I've been told the last thing a buyer cares about is the ability/ease of repair. I just don't get it. I don't like things I can't easily repair.
There will be the day when the good job goes bye bye. Plus, there's a freedom knowing you have a chance at repairing something youself when that warranty goes bye bye?
I would love Apple again if they built a practical electric car. Put a few bells, and whistles in it, but don't it impossible to repair.
This is the question. Indeed, an electric auto is far simpler to manufacture than a legacy auto. Drastically less parts. Similarly, Tesla has demonstrated huge value in software component of the car, from the app, dashboard, OTA updates, not to mention fleet-wide machine learning.
Don't also forget Apple is extremely good at creating electronic devices. Apple has less than 20% of the phone device market but makes well over 90% of the profit. They hardly ever have supply issues (such as Google's Pixel) or quality issues (such as Note 7). Apple is known for their cachet and design but the reason Tim Cook is now the CEO of the largest company in the world is because their supply chain is, by far, the best in the world.
If a company is well placed to make an amazing electric car, it's Apple.
That may be the case but it's a solved problem. Legacy makers can churn out engines and transmissions on automated lines with no difficulty. Other than the engine and transmission, the rest of the car is about the same.
Apple would likely do cars the way they do phones. So one of the barriers they will crack is Chinese-made cars being sold in the USA. And as a result, I expect that Apple's margins on cars will be triple those of North American manufacturers.
Not only does Apple plan every build in extreme detail (stations, tests, flow, etc), they send an army of PMs, EPMs, engineers, etc. to oversee each build in person. They have to.
Apple's manufacturing and operations expertise is enormous. It's a competitive advantage on the same scale as, say, Google's data center expertise.
whoa...chill out on the kool-aid
If they wanted to Foxconn it, I would think a company like Kia or Hyundai would be a logical partner for them to get into the business. Apple designs it with the help of their manufacturing expertise and imposes their usual tyrannical quality requirements (maybe with the help of some employees they could score from Honda or Toyota to get the requisite quality levels), their Korean partner produces it and everybody's happy.
It's the same reason that, say, Intel doesn't (can't) do consumer logic fabrication to compete with TSMC or Samsung. They have the technical know-how, but their fab capacity is already filled with Xeons that fetch like 4x the margin.
The real question is why would it be a wise move for any SV tech giant to move into the very competitive car industry. Is it a more profitable investment than healthcare, food or shipbuilding?
The fact that they have mobile platforms is irrelevant, unless they plan to ban Uber from their app stores.
Couple of reasons.
- Self driving car is an interplay of Software and Hardware.
- Apple needs a new market to make some noise.
- Tim Cook needs something big to carve out his own legacy, maybe he thinks self driving tech is ticket to come out of Job's shadow.
I am looking forward to see what they come up with.
If Apple needs auto manufacturing/design know-how they should look at a small company like Volvo or Jaguar.
Theoretically it would be possible to buy the company without their support - but it would be extremely costly and unlikely.
Google has maps, Uber has cars, other are just cars.
Is there a way to express appreciation of humor on HN without getting down voted?
(Obviously 'lol' / 'haha' are looked down upon here)
PS -- If anyone actually does this, e.g. by strapping an old SGI Indy and its 90s webcam to their ride, please post photos here!
Self driving cars should protect the weaker traffic participants, not use their space as a 'get out of the way' option if that space is occupied.
I'd be more afraid of crossing in front of a driver-less car. An automatic vehicle may have better reaction times than a human but I wouldn't want to be the first road fatality from a software bug.
The first road fatality from a software bug happened long ago.
It's a shitty situation here.
https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/img_0059-jpg.565631...
I'm not sure what Apple expects to bring to this party but I know if you're getting a masters or PhD right now make sure your thesis topic is machine learning autonomous action in health/life/safety situations :-). I expect you will be recruited heavily.
PC's of a couple of decades ago provide a parallel. Microsoft getting 10's of dollars of margin off every PC, Intel getting 10's or maybe 100+ dollars of margin off every PC, and motherboard makers with a gross margin of $3 per board. Much less the case makers....
The old line auto manufactures are building cases for the computers and software that are tomorrow's self-driving cars.
It's a large consumer market that's changing rapidly and ripe for disruption. Why would you doubt that Apple will enter it?
The real reason I think Apple would pull the plug on it's car project, is if they believe we are about to move to a transportation as a service world. Ride sharing and self driving cars are trends that point in that direction. Apple is a (consumer) product company. Their internal structure is set up to make the best consumer products and sell them directly to consumers. They are not set up to be a services company. Being a (successful) services company is to some extent antithetical to being a successful product company. Apple knows this.
Perhaps not "insurmountable"...
...but you realize that what Apple currently manufactures is equivalent to one single, near-insignificant component of what goes into a car: the on-board navigation system.
Building a car is hard. I don't think Apple can't do it, but I'm convinced they won't find it "worth it".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_as_a_Service
Exactly. Some self-driving projects have used electric or hybrid cars because they usually have electric power steering, which is easy to control by computer. But the technologies are unrelated.
However, my question: Is/Was this industry only held back by sensing?
edit: Restructure paragraph
Regards,
Tesla would suffer a bit since their data is less rich without lidar, but make up for some of that with the larger aggregate miles traveled.
Not to say some players don't have better lidar than others, but the sensor quality/price should even out over time since credible third parties are in the business of selling it.
All those together account for a good chunk of the reasons why right now there are at least 10 and probably more parties active (parties that have a credible shot at achieving this).
Quanergy has been in "fake it til' you make it" mode for a year now; they announced an impressive product 14 months ago and didn't ship. Their web site looks as if they're shipping, but they're not. Now they're trying to get in on the Trump border wall security business.[2]
[1] http://continental-automated-driving.com/Navigation/Enablers... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2017/03/24/silicon-...
Tag-line "the future in motion".
Logo character: a horse.
Really?
It's as if they wanted to present themselves both as an old and respectable company (hence the horse, and name), and yet still modern enough to define the future.
The mashup though is so clumsily done it makes me believe the company is either a very early stage startup, or an utter scam.
http://www.conti-online.com/generator/www/start/com/en/index...
Their main website has a splash flash page, which lead me to believe that they didn't put a lot of effort into "public", but not customer, branding. That's reasonable since they're a manufacturer.
However, I've also noted that they're German.
It's not very surprising that a German enterprise isn't spending a lot of effort on its English-language portal.
First of all, it's a high price tag for them to get top talent in the area. Waymo, Uber, Tesla, Ford (and a dozen other car companies), and who knows how many start ups are all vying for the same pool of engineers. Even if they get top talent, it's another story holding onto it. If you look at the LinkedIns (Anthony Levandowski, Jur van den Berg, Chris Thrun, all the founders of Otto and Argo AI), they change jobs every two years.
Their success I feel depends on how much control they are willing to give up in partnerships and how good they are at choosing winners in the race to autonomous vehicles. They already have $1B invested in Didi last year--it will be interesting to see where they go from here.
The iPhone entered a crowded phone market and now controls the vast majority of smartphone profits. There's really no such thing as market "saturation" when you can grow the market and eat old participants.
> First of all, it's a high price tag for them to get top talent in the area.
Apple has $250 billion in cash, so this doesn't strike me as a huge concern.
> Their success I feel depends on how much control they are willing to give up in partnerships…
As with phones, their hypothetical success in this area will be due to how much they won't give up. Apple learned this lesson with the disastrous Motorola ROKR E1, a.k.a. the one where they tried to be a "good industry partner" and play by industry rules.
If Apple enters this market, they'll play by Apple's rules and give up virtually nothing. Any launch partner(s) will profit, but on Apple's terms.
It's not their money, it's the shareholders. It might be tough to make a case to them to jump into this market.
The iPhone was far superior to other phones of its day. Plus it had significant network effects - having more users meant having more apps, which meant having more users.
Self driving tech would be much more a commodity product. Even some Apple employees "struggled to explain what Apple could bring to a self-driving car that other companies could not" [1] And self driving cars will have absolutely no network effects or 'lock-in'. Ford will dump Apple's self-driving technology in an instant if Google offers their technology a bit cheaper.
[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/technology/apple-is-sa...
The car companies aren't making the same mistake that Microsoft and other old tech companies made with smartphones. They all see that autonomous vehicles are coming and they're doing their best to put out their own solutions. For them to "grow the market," they have to do AVs far better than everyone else. It's tough to imagine them doing that with Google working on this since 2009.
> Apple has $250 billion in cash, so this doesn't strike me as a huge concern.
It's an arms race to outspend in this area. Yes, they could muscle their way through, but only at a huge cost. And even then, employees could leave to start their own startups (see Faraday Futures, Otto, Argo AI, etc.)
> If Apple enters this market, they'll play by Apple's rules and give up virtually nothing
There are way more parts in building an autonomous vehicle than a mobile phone. This graphic [1] does a good job of getting into some of involved industries. Shareholders won't stand for them to sink money into reinventing the wheel (e.g. car components, vehicle to vehicle communication software, AI.)
[1] http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/SELFDRIVING-SUPPLI...
I suspect, at least in the beginning, they will just be building autonomous technology and letting the auto manufacturers add it to their cars.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-teslamotors-cash-insight-i...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardhyu/2017/02/24/why-invest...
Tesla and Google have some advantage, but it is still far from reality.
Why is this idea so opposed by everyone?
Honestly, I am completely baffled that people who write software think self-driving cars are just around the corner. At this point I think it's basically a futurist cult.
This the general consensus in the academy too.
I'd find that totally reasonable, and get back behind the wheel to take my own risks in a snowstorm (or ... you know... stay at home like the advisories always tell you to).
Such a product would still have a large market value since there are nice climates with dense populations in the world too, but not everyone lives in California.
However our yearly precipitation is ~132 days, where each of those isn't a straight 24 hours of rain or snowfall.
I wouldn't find it terrible to buy a self-driving car that runs 2/3rds of the year without any problems, and I need to drive personally if and only if I must go out during heavy rain or snowfall instead of waiting 1 hour for the rain to stop.
Right now, many times I just wait for the rain to stop before going out because there isn't anything pressing or time sensitive about needing groceries on a Tuesday.
This is assuming that "self-driving cars" isn't just another name for driver assistance packages and is actually level 5 autonomy (which a few of my friends believe will be on the road this year with Tesla model 3)
It's in particular a California cult, because they don't actually have weather there.
Anybody who has dealt with driving in a full blown northern winter is likely more skeptical.
The sheer number of cars used and the variety of places they're used in means that thousands of cars get caught up in bizarre situations every day. Cars will be shutting down inconveniently all over the place unless they can apply general reasoning skill to navigate through the innumerable trials that drivers currently have to cope with.
Most of the self-driving crash videos I've seen involve a car that lost it when it couldn't follow the white line. Following the white is not good enough.
and shortly self driving Volvos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q00jIBhkq4
None of those have human level AI. There's a lot you can do in the real world without that.
It's interesting that Volvo seems, rather than out AIing their competitors to have gone to town on the sensors with several radars, cameras and lidar.
It's entirely valid to state that we can do lots with our current tech, because we can, but when the topic is self driving cars on public roads, it makes no sense to claim they're possible without general AI based on the fact that an existing bus can drive around a closed course.
Giving those busses the ability to navigate arbitrary situations on public roads is not simply an incremental improvement, it requires that you solve a fundamentally different problem.
I have multiple friends with years of experience in academia who think that Tesla is launching "Tesla Network" - driverless taxis this year.
But if you mean truly driverless cars on public roads, with noone in the driver seat, then sorry, driving isn't just riding in a lane and reading a handful of road signs. It includes responding to anything in your environment. For example, if you see a ball bounce in front of your car, you will instinctively slow down since there might be a kid running after the ball. A driverless car making that inference? No chance.
So, Apple's opportunity will be L2-L3.
Planes and trains have been driving themselves for many years but they still have human pilots. The human need for somebody to blame is stronger than market forces trying to eliminate human drivers
My interpretation: it took a while—17 years—for people to warm up to driverless trains on fixed routes with no at-grade intersections.
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/BART-Responds-to-NTSB-R...
Humans have proven themselves to be mentally flexible by, for example, training themselves not to have a fear of snakes which is believed to be an innate fear of primates, speculatively including humans.
This means humans could possibly overcome the fear of being in a fast moving vehicle without human control, but I would argue that the self discipline needed to train our entire population not to fear these vehicles would be enough of an obstacle that they will never be realized.
There's also the human factor at play. For a long while humans and robots will be sharing the road, and as soon as human drivers learn that the robots will avoid collisions at all costs they will start abusing machine controlled vehicles. A human will reach a point where they say "Well, fuck it just run into me then" but it would be unethical to program a machine with the same logic. Other humans know they can't fuck with people too much or they risk a confrontation. I think its an open question how nice society will be to participant unable to retaliate.
A more realistic path for self driving vehicles is special segregated lanes on highways. This is already done for HOV vehicles so much of the infastructure and design is already in place. Self driving transports would use these lanes connect between hubs where the vehicles are brought under human control for the short and more chaotic final leg to their destination. This could be workable with our current highways and without scaring the hell out of anyone, but it means that much of the research towards these vehicles is currently misguided.
Sorry for posting a short and hollow response originally. I have been accused of doing so on the site before but my reasoning is to try to avoid giant walls of text like this. You're right in implying.l that such short and zany sounding answers don't add much to the discussion
I suspect that the initial implied liability carried by the first batch of commercially sold self-driving vehicles will lead to extensive sensor logs and 360° dash cam recordings. In the event a human driver tries to game a self-driving vehicle and it causes an accident, the extensive data logging will supply far more than traffic courts and insurance companies have ordinarily dealt with before, and likely lead to new legal precedents.
If the LIDAR data logging shows a human driver recklessly accelerated towards the self-driving car (presumably thinking it would get out of the way) and the path of least damage correctly chosen was to stay put because of merging cars on either side, then most attorneys and insurance companies will find it hard to challenge sub-second LIDAR data that can be reconstructed to overlay data on the video log.
One potential development out of this push for self-driving vehicles that might catch us by surprise is ubiquitous, extensive data logging in vehicles, both human- and computer-driven. In order to sell the tech at a mass scale, all sorts of sensors must sell much cheaper than even today, and they won't necessarily be limited to only computer-driven cars. Like cell phone cameras made solid-state cameras and storing large amounts of photos and videos cheaper than the mass market imagined possible only 30 years ago, and now people are putting those camera sub-assemblies to use outside of cell phones.
As shitty as the human race is much of the time, people in life or death situations regularly show a lack of self preservation when given the choice between saving themselves or someone else. Human history is littered with countless real, and imagined, heroes that gave their lives to help the species. How does this relate to self driving cars?
A real situation these cars will deal with is weighing the potential death of their occupant vs another person. Humans regularly swerve off the road to to avoid hitting pedestrians and animals. Sometimes they die doing this. If a machine goes on trial for killing a pedestrian rather than risk a 10% chance of death for its passenger, what do we do? A human in most situations would have risked their life to avoid certain death of another, but it's unethical (and nobody would buy) a machine that could willingly sacrifice its owner under any circumstances.
I believe this dilemma is un-solvable. This and similar situations will quickly result in laws that require a human to always be present, negating most of the advantages of automated driving
You are correct; it is un-solvable through technical means, as this dilemma requires a cultural shift that could take several generations to accept sensor- and machine-made decisions that are the embodiment of likely monied interests' policies who will lobby for the necessary legislative scaffolding. Not that will prevent companies from trying technical solutions: it may push sensor boundaries much further out, and at far greater granularity, for example. Scanning out to the mechanical limits of braking distance at current measured road traction, modeling every detected element, and simming projected versus actual paths microsecond by microsecond, and ultra-defensively maneuver. Not even limiting to just reacting to unfolding emergencies, but proactively easing out of potentially developing risk, like noticing it might get boxed in by human-driven vehicles (maybe identified by their erratic steering, not even requiring an IFF-type system), and easing out to join a "herd" of self-driving cars further ahead.
> "We can disable the ignition but not while you're driving," Melanie Boudreau, a spokesperson at IMETRIK, a Canadian maker of starter interrupt devices that run around $100 each, told Fortune. "We don't want to kill you."