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Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

nytimes.com

31–40 of 434 posts

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#31
post #25
post #14

A moral of this story is "don't name things 'Titan' or titan-related names". It's asking for trouble - Blizzard's 'Project Titan', Titan A.E., the Titanic. Things didn't end all that well for the titans in Greek mythology either.

Nice point, but I guess so far the chemical element titanium is doing all right.

It's faking it, still bitter about the time Apple kicked it out their laptops.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#33
post #5

Why does the tech industry focus on self-driving cars so much? It's absolutely never going to happen, ever. The world would be much better off if we converted our roads to a rail/streetcar system and drop the personal car concept entirely. The hype around this is worse than VR.

Tesla and Uber need constant hype to keep investors believing. Even Google needs to diversify away from its desktop ads business, or show it has significant room to grow. For a while last year I was taken in by the hype and thought self driving cars were really a lot closer than I previously admitted, but then I realised there is an agenda pushing these success stories.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#35
post #5

Why does the tech industry focus on self-driving cars so much? It's absolutely never going to happen, ever. The world would be much better off if we converted our roads to a rail/streetcar system and drop the personal car concept entirely. The hype around this is worse than VR.

> Why does the tech industry focus on self-driving cars so much? It's absolutely never going to happen, ever. It's already happened.

These slow electric busses are all over the world on serious trials with real passengers.

For examples: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/18/self-driv...

But they have also been used in DC, Vegas, Perth, the Netherlands and other places.

It might not be a total replacement for cars but they are self-driving vehicles that are moving passengers now.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#36
“From the beginning, the employees dedicated to Project Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed silently. They also studied ways to redesign a car interior without a steering wheel or gas pedals, and they worked on adding virtual or augmented reality into interior displays.

The team also worked on a new light and ranging detection sensor, also known as lidar. Lidar sensors normally protrude from the top of a car like a spinning cone and are essential in driverless cars. Apple, as always focused on clean designs, wanted to do away with the awkward cone.

Apple even looked into reinventing the wheel. A team within Titan investigated the possibility of using spherical wheels — round like a globe — instead of the traditional, round ones, because spherical wheels could allow the car better lateral movement.”

Very interesting, and one heck of a leak if true.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it that you don't want self driving cars to happen or you don't THINK it will happen? I, for one, am super excited for self driving personal vehicles and will be glad to see the eradication of mass public transportation like trains and buses.

There's a strong case to be made that this isn't a desirable outcome in a lot of areas. Trains and buses are much more efficient at moving people than individual cars, even if they're self-driving. I'm also extremely excited about autonomous cars, but neither desire nor think they will replace mass transit. edit: As a few people have mentioned, my suggestion that "trains are buses are much more efficient" is dubious.…

"Trains and buses are much more efficient at moving people than individual cars, even if they're self driving"

Dubious claim that needs evidence. I think you're underestimating the potential throughput gains from autonomy. As just one example, speed limits can probably be greatly increased when you take the realities of human reaction times out of the equation.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#38
post #3

"But people within the industrial design team including Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, believed that a fully driverless car would allow the company to reimagine the automobile experience, according to the five people." Ah Jony Ive, first he ruined iOS 7 and now this constant need to tinker with things that work fine. I love the hardware design but please leave the software and HID bit alone... of course YMMV P…

I wonder if Ive has as much influence as people think. The last few iPhones look horrible with the camera sticking out. And it looks like this will be the case for iPhone 8 too.

I imagine he must not be very happy with the way they look either.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#39

If Apple were truly serious about building self-driving cars, they would buy one of the big 3 US auto manufacturers. It could buy all 3 with cash and still have one of the largest hoards of cash ever accumulated.

Over the decades I've noticed how businesses need to recognize and focus on their core competencies - if they don't, they die. Everything must feed that core, and undue distractions are lethal. Occasionally there's a need to pivot, which is deliberately stepping from one competency to another, but that is rare and difficult. Apple's core is to build small computers; everything else they do (music, video, cloud services, Siri, AI, AR, operating systems, etc) are all built to draw customers deeper into the ecosystem for the sole purpose of buying more small computers. Electric self-driving cars, while very nifty, are decidedly not small computers (at best being a tiny part of a large product demanding other competencies); to compete in that market requires scale which Apple could certainly buy but would fiercely compete for the attention vs small computers.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#40
post #3

"But people within the industrial design team including Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, believed that a fully driverless car would allow the company to reimagine the automobile experience, according to the five people." Ah Jony Ive, first he ruined iOS 7 and now this constant need to tinker with things that work fine. I love the hardware design but please leave the software and HID bit alone... of course YMMV P…

I think iOS usability has become and is increasingly becoming, more complicated and less easy to use. But this doesn't have anything to do with the flat design, but with the many features, buttons, and gestures being added every new release.

I think it's the new features - but also the desire to make the OS appear simple - so new features get hidden in unexpected places and it feels inconsistent. iOS was a breeze to use up until iOS 6 because it didn't really do all that much and it's much easier to design a small screen interface if you don't have many features.
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