Greg Kable, writing for Autocar:
Ground zero for the iCar right now is the workshop at 960 Kifer Road in Sunnyvale. In this Silicon Valley suburb, which is also home to a long established Mercedes-Benz research and development centre among hundreds of ambitious start-up companies, Apple is rumoured to be developing elements of its newest product under the cloak of a shell company called SixtyEight Research.
And:
SixEight Research is named on documentation as being the importer of a 1957 Fiat Multipla 600 from the UK to the US in 2014 – a move that has led to rumours that the production iCar could take the form of an upright one-box MPV-style car similar in dimensions to the Volkswagen Budd-E revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show last January.
Here’s a picture of that car.
The article is full of little gems, a long thread of rumors and a sprinkling of cloak and dagger. Not sure how much, if any, of this is new information, but a fascinating read.
Strangely enough, we are all making the assumption that Apple wants to make a car to sell to us. Would it not make more sense for Apple to sell us a subscription to transportation by establishing a network of highly reliable and highly available autonomous vehicles? This could explain it’s investment in the Chinese Uber competitor, a ripe market for such a service, considering the minimal legal loopholes and issues they would face while they “work out the kinks.”
The USA could be an expansion market for this service, after all the kinks are worked out.
“SixEight Research is named on documentation as being the importer of a 1957 Fiat Multipla 600 …”
Because the most recent Multipla was horrendously ugly.
Fortunately production ended in 2010.
I never assumed that Apple would be selling cars to consumers. The world is moving toward electric + self-driving + on-demand cars. And that will radically disrupt many huge, deeply entrenched industries.
No need to find parking, no need to waste real estate on a garage, no dreaded trip to the car dealer, no need for car insurance, reduced need for public transportation, no more gas stations, ad nauseam.
Apple’s investment in Didi Chuxing was probably made just to get access to usage data, codebase, etc. so Apple can study a real transportation service. They can analyze how people use the mobile app, how the server-side logistics work, and maybe even add their own optimization heuristics for predicting where the “swarm” of vehicles should be for handling normal and special-event situations.
We’ll see. Self-driving cars are still pretty far away. Small matter of programming. Oh, and by the way, Swift 3 has many changes for the sake of making your code more reliable, with strong type-checking and robust error-handling. And software reliability is going to be critical for any self-driving car.
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