Apple’s self-driving electric car is at least half a decade away | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s self-driving electric car is at least half a decade away

bloomberg.com

31 pointstosh64 comments

My first impression is favorable. It's a little bit expensive but the design is incredible. You also get Apple+ for a year. Apple haters will nag about having only one door when everyone else has at least two. MacRumors says that iCar Pro will have two doors and a hatch.

What I don't like is that I must use expensive Apple wheels, and even the smallest repairs must be handled in Apple shop. For some, the home charging station (wireless of course) is a deal-breaker. It costs almost as much as the car itself.

(small print): Commercial users like Uber and Lyft must pay 20% extra commission to Apple Store.

glad we agree. I am a little concerned about the rounded rectangle wheels, but then again we re only going to be driving on Apple Roads(TM). I hope they make a version without the door, it will look awesome. i m fine just lying on the roof

> It costs almost as much

Just get the adapter, it's only $1699

> It's a little bit expensive but the design is incredible.

What incredible design are you referring to? Do they have a design and prototype already that has internal and external pictures released?

nabla9's comment is in jest. It's poking fun at Apple and some of its users/practices

I didn't catch that, and it looks like their comment was edited after I first saw it to make my comment. Thanks for responding to let me know instead of just downvoting like others.

>and even the smallest repairs must be handled in Apple shop

only fair for Apple to enter cars after Tesla copied its servicing practices/policies.

> You also get Apple+ for a year.

Or for a mere $2799 extra, you can get it without.

Psychology is really interesting. "half a decade away" sounds like a really long time, but "5 years away" sounds much shorter.

It's an intriguing editorial choice.

Apple's car is at least the lesser part of a century away.

And 5 years in automotive is less than one full redesign cycle for a platform. So, it's not long at all in automotive speak.

I thought the same... 5 years ago was only the iPhone 6S era.

I think it’s referencing some unreliable rumors they were launching this year though

This is the first thing that came to my mind reading the headline as well. I'm sure Apple has a head start on R&D and of course they are an amazing organization with plenty of resources but overcoming the engineering challenges required to implement a self-driving electric car in 5 years is optimistic to my mind.

Probably, so is Tesla's. Tesla's so-called "Full self driving" is still a level 2 system. It still needs constant driver attention for when it screws up.

"Unfortunately, we see that some automakers use the term 'self-driving' in an inaccurate way, giving consumers and the general public a false impression of the capabilities of driver assist (not fully autonomous) technology," - Waymo, which just stopped using the term "self-driving".

Jumping from level 2 to 5 is going to be extremely difficult. I have no idea how we will ever accomplish that. Tesla is playing around a bit now, but this strategy will only work up until the moment a Tesla kills someone while provably being operated in "FSD" mode.

I don’t think you can hit a consumer price point with a vehicle with sufficient sensors. A taxi, though, can amortize the cost of a richer sensor suite.

Elon believes LiDAR is unnecessary and I’m inclined to believe him. After all, humans have exactly two “cameras”, while Teslas already have many more cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensors.

To be fair, though, human eyes are so superior to any existing camera technology that it is hard to compare them. And the amount of processing attached to those eyes is staggering. LIDAR may be strictly unnecessary in the end, but for the foreseeable future computers can use all the help they can get.

> human eyes are so superior to any existing camera technology that it is hard to compare them

Not in every respect. Cameras can have a wider field of view, they can see wavelengths humans can’t, and of course you can have more than two, each looking in a different direction at the same time.

3 is attainable. Waymo, and probably Cruise, are at 3.

The problem with 3 and 4 isn’t that it’s hard but that it may not be a good idea at all. It’s a system you should monitor at all times but kind of works when you don’t? No security conscious manufacturer should make those.

If Tesla can prove riding in their autonomous cars is an order of magnitude safer than human operated cars then it would be unethical to not allow them to switch on full autonomy.

It would be unethical that Tesla's magical actually full self-driving is only available as a autonomous system, not as driver assistance. You should not compare a modelS driven in favorable weather on favorable roads with younger people to the average car on the average road. You should also not compare a autonomous system with a system with no comparable driver assistance.

Tesla will convince me of driverless cars when a modelS driverless outperforms a modelS with a driver using emergency braking and lane keeping assist.

That's a big if. And as discussed recently on HN, it can't just be safer than average human drivers, it has to be safer than good human drivers. That is a pretty tall order.

Are “good” human drivers an order of magnitude better than “average” human drivers? Because that’s where I put my bar: marginally better than “good”, an order of magnitude better than “average”.

Just like everyone else’s. And nuclear fusion.

This is a bad idea for Apple. We don't need electric or self-driving cars. We need cities designed for walking and biking. Our society is choked with multi-lane roads and giant parking lots everywhere, making all other transportation options infeasible.

We will not solve the climate crisis if everyone is carried around in a 4000 lb steel cage.

They’re two barely related problems that require different solutions. Better-designed cities doesn’t do anything for the millions of Americans living out in the burbs. And Apple isn’t empowered to make changes to cities; that’s up to governments to do and who are most likely strapped for funds to do any sort of major infrastructure investment.

> for the millions of Americans living out in the burbs

They live in burbs because American cities are so badly designed.

This viewpoint is puzzling to me. It starts from the assumption that all people want to live in highly dense central areas. This is clearly and completely untrue.

Most people who live in the suburbs because they want to live in single family homes in low density areas.

You must choose one or another. Either you build city where

1) it's nice to live in the central area and people commute outwards with trains and subways. It's very hard to commute in and out of the city with your own car.

2) you can build a s easy to drive and out city centre but nobody likes to live there. Big highways and parking split the city and increase distances too much.

The US has mostly #2 but there are some #1 cities too.

american cities are obviously built for cars and assume people commute to work. compare this with old cities e.g. in europe.

It seems there will be major shifts in the way people work , and thus live, and thus cities will probably change

Or maybe some people don’t like being packed into cities like sardines, and America has plenty of land?

Unfortunately solving that problem is muuuuucccchhh more difficult. It's decided at the local level where homeowners are locked into huge investments that are dependent on car infrastructure. And in cities, even supposedly "left" movements have very little appetite for this sort of switch from private infrastructure to public transit infrastructure, at least here in California.

I am skeptical of anybody engineering full level 65 self driving cars within the foreseeable future, but I think it's more likely than the necessary change you lay out. (I would consider it a huge success beyond all imagination if we had city planning changed to allow even 50% of our households to live a car-free life)

I think self-driving taxis need to be in a separate category. No need to park them in the city core, but they provide the range and comfort people seek.

The self-driving taxi fleets of tomorrow are just today's Uber without the exploitation of gig workers.

As many cities have observed, cheap on-demand rides are not an improvement on traffic congestion, quite the opposite.

> without the exploitation of gig workers.

I'm pretty sure that the people who decry 'exploitation' will be condemning robotic taxis for putting cabbies out of work altogether

Also, the whole notion of 'exploitation' is, frankly, ridiculous

It’s pretty bizarre to (in the same sentence) imply Uber is “exploiting” gig workers, and also self-driving taxis eliminating that “exploitation” is a good thing for them.

Uber without the exploitation of gig workers is an absolute dream. In what sense is the word "just" justifiable?

If you live in a city, more cars isn't a dream, sorry.

yeah, let's put everyone out of work

While there may not be a reduction in traffic, there’s a massive improvement in quality of life.

Autonomous vehicles would be a tremendous blessing to make cities more livable and human centered. Autonomous vehicles are:

Safer - always obey speed limits, traffic laws, yield to pedestrians, are always cautious and have super-human reflexes

Quieter - electric, never rev their engines, or peel-out

Cleaner - electric, operate at efficient speeds

Take up less space - never need to park, can "convoy" within inches of another vehicle

See Jevons paradox. More car traffic is not something that the average city resident wishes for.

I live in a pretty large city Chicago and I'm not concerned about additional traffic from autonomous vehicles (though I don't count myself as average either). Widespread usage of autonomous vehicles will have so many large and wide-ranging effects, that it will not simply be "more traffic in cities". Another possibility is a large portion of city dwellers will get weekend homes hours away since driving that distance will be trivial when you can watch Netflix or play videos games on the way. Tourism may also increase as people from smaller towns will come into the city for nightlife since their cars can drive them home drunk. Even with twice the cars on the road trips may be much faster without cars blocking traffic by making late turns on red. Electric cars are interesting, but super-human autonomous drivers will be revolutionary.

Yes, and also because in the future people will not own cars. Whenever you need a car, you just order one and within minutes a self-driving car will be in front of your door. Not owning a car also means people will not really want "premium" brand (or perhaps only on special occasions).

They should instead focus on making incredible remote work tools. That will reduce emissions more than any electric car

This on so many levels. Electric cars are literally an extension or life lease for our existing poorly structured society and behaviour; an excuse to carry on as before. We need to change how we operate as a species.

Edit: and there’s the symptom. People don’t want their cheese being moved.

Capitalism can only give us better products. It can't solve societal issues requiring political leadership to step up.

That said, in a perfect world Apple would build commuter and cargo e-bikes and heavily lobby for federal transportation policy changes which make it easier to claw back roadway for safe, protected bike/ped use.

BTW, Apple once did a study into some Segway-like vehicle

And so was their iGoggles, which were apparently started, and cancelled at least 3 times internally.

Apple is so rich it can comission RnD on really whimsical things like transparent, and flexible smartphones. And things completely random on a whim like their furniture project.

I don't see iCoffeeTable coming as much as I don't see iCar. People are reading in too much into every random leak.

https://archive.is/r732X

I can't wait to see what the cost of the charging cable will be for that one.

> “Siri, stop the car!”

> “Ok, here is what I found on the internet for ‘Stop the car’”

At least it’ll probably work when they release it rather than be a paid add on that will be persistently delivered in 6 months...

it seems like you coughed there, did you say it's five years away?

Probably more like half a century.

> [Apple] is seeking a lead engineer to integrate “audio drivers, tuners, speakers, microphones, wired buses, power supplies, wireless communication, and antennas” into autonomous systems.

As an outsider to this space, it’s always puzzled me that Elon constructs a dichotomy between lidar-based and vision-based self-driving.

I find that I rely on my hearing nearly as much as my eyesight. Especially to detect dangerous conditions that demand quick decisions, I find that hearing is the most important of the senses.

Does anyone know the extent to which microphones and audio processing feeds into Tesla or Waymo or other self-driving systems?

>I find that hearing is the most important of the senses.

Sorry, I disagree. If you can see why you need to hear also? Seeing will give you more insight (size, speed, clear distance etc). A sound will give you none of that. You can get some clue about distance from sound but it may not be entirely accurate.

> Seeing will give you more insight (size, speed, clear distance etc).

There is a device that does all of that complete flawlessly, consumes single watts, requires no exotic materials, costs few dollars in mass production, fits on a business card, and is manufacturable in millions.

It's called radar. Accentuation on just anything else is the best proof that they never took the task seriously.

I can't speak to how Tesla or Waymo work at that level but I suspect they don't use sound. Even for yourself, it seems as if sound helps you to be aware of something that you then look at. If a car can already "see" in 360 degrees and everything already gets the same amount of attention, would sound help?

>I find that I rely on my hearing nearly as much as my eyesight. Especially to detect dangerous conditions that demand quick decisions, I find that hearing is the most important of the senses.

Would that still be true if you had eyes pointed in all directions? Hearing is 360 degrees, and so is automotive vision/lidar.

Someone can correct me if I’m wrong about the biophysics of perception, but it seems to me that I register surprising sounds with less latency than unusual sights.

Computers definitely have less latency for audio than video, what with audio waves having many thousands of hertz while for video anything over 120fps is high speed.

The latency of sound processing in computers is probably less relevant than the latency of sound propagation due to physics.

Speed of sound is ~350m/s. So, whatever you're processing in 1/120th of a second is sound that was only like 10 feet away.

I don't think these components are related to the self driving aspect of the project. I've worked on vehicle systems for 12 years and to me this reads more like the multimedia and telematics components of a vehicle. These days, nearly everything in a car is connected by a wired data bus: steering wheel buttons, ignition, rearview mirror, tail lights, accelerator pedal, door locks... even transmission and brakes in many vehicles.

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