Daisuke Wakabayashi, writing for the New York Times:
The company has put off any notion of an Apple-branded autonomous vehicle and is instead working on the underlying technology that allows a car to drive itself.
And:
A notable symbol of that retrenchment is a self-driving shuttle service that ferries employees from one Apple building to another. The shuttle, which has never been reported before, will likely be a commercial vehicle from an automaker and Apple will use it to test the autonomous driving technology that it develops.
And:
Five people familiar with Apple’s car project, code-named “Titan,” discussed with The New York Times the missteps that led the tech giant to move — at least for now — from creating a self-driving Apple car to creating technology for a car that someone else builds. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about Apple’s plans.
The project’s reduced scale aligns Apple more closely with other tech companies that are working on autonomous driving technology but are steering clear of building cars. Even Waymo, the Google self-driving spinoff that is probably furthest along among Silicon Valley companies, has said repeatedly that it does not plan to produce its own vehicles.
This is the way Apple works. In fact, this is the way any large-scale, R&D based business works. Experiment, build, test, learn, pivot. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes you end up going in a completely different direction.
Research counts on missteps. It’s part of the process.
The tone of this article reads to me as: “Apple screws up royally, they just couldn’t build a car, have to settle for the scraps of building a shuttle for its employees.”
Another take could be, “Apple continues to learn about the auto space, takes another step forward by designing and building an actual, working autonomous vehicle which they will put into use moving employees around their campuses. Amazing that they came so far so quickly. Who knows where they’ll ultimately take this technology?”
Me? I think that second take is closer to reality.
NYT clickbait to help them feel like they have a finger on the pulse of Silicon Valley.
IF Apple ever produces a car or autonomous car or other variant, you can bet the media and competitors will be scratching their heads wondering just how Apple did it, because Apple keeps details
Never mind reporting on the social benefits resulting from a generation of safe autonomous cars, Mr. Wakabayashi.
How is this a retrenchment, Apple never publicly admitted to building a car in the first place. The NYT, speculating on misinformation, are the ones declaring Apple is working on an Autonomous car.
Really, ‘tinkering’. I believe its takes a lot more than just ‘tinkering’ to create a revolutionary communication device that changes the shape of mankind forever, DB. And I imagine the same could be said for an fully autonomous car too.
Daisuke Wakabayashi, why don’t you go back to suckling on Google’s teat and leave Apple conjecture to more intelligent and talented journalists.
I must admit that I’ve always been leery of the idea of Apple building a car.
I suspect that in addition to the technical hurdles for automation, they may have also looked at it from a business perspective.
Apple is (in)famous for their high profit margins. The automobile industry is definitely not. There’s a huge number of regulations, it’s incredibly competitive, etc.
Creating the software, the interface, and perhaps the hardware to run it looks like a far more profitable area to focus.
This is bullshit.
Offer nothing of value, but get paid twice.
Is Apple maybe working on an autonomous driving system? Sure, it’s possible. Were they ever working on a car? That’s possible, too, but you wouldn’t have known it without shit heads like this.
Illustrates my point that rather than building a giant space doughnut Apple would be better served to move substantial chunks of its teams to environments as different as possible from Cupertino (e.g. downtown Brooklyn). The technology to build an autonomous vehicle that traverses a fixed route through the homogeneous environment and wide streets of Silicon Valley has been available since the 1970s. Although such systems are certainly better and more reliable today the real test is having them drive through a dense Pittsburgh neighborhood with heavy pedestrian and vehicle traffic in a driving slush/snow storm just turning to ice. With half the street signs (and the GPS antennas) crusted with rime and views blocked by snowplow-created banks. Which will never happen at 1 Infinite Loop.
How is Apple’s housing in any way related to this?
Monoculture of experience.
More like efficient collaboration of teams that shouldn’t ever be siloed.
I’m well aware of the value of physical collaboration – I preach it myself. I’m also aware of how different coastal California is from the rest of the world and how unaware people who have spent their lives there (Mission Oaks HS => Stanford, Berkeley, USC => Cupertino) are that they lack experience of non- California environments.
So which of these two unrelated issues is the hobbyhorse you’re riding, and which is the current scapegoat for it? Apple’s autonomous car or Apple’s housing?
I doubt that you are actually unable to read thoughtful criticism based on interconnected factors, so I’ll just chalk your response up to Apple fanboy counterattack reflex.
Convenient. So apart from citing the potential value of real-world driving obstacles—which I think would come a lot later in the development schedule for any company that has a concern for public safety—you still haven’t related your two issues.
Nor have you demonstrated how you know for a fact that Apple isn’t already conducting tests outside of the monoculture’s territory.