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Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

nytimes.com

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

#351

Post by skgoa »

wut42 wrote: post #251
jacquesm wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This so reminds me of the discussion about fire from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. The challenge of a self driving car is to get it to drive by itself, not to try to make it look good and to solve a whole pile of engineering problems that have had everybody in engineering looking at them since as long as we have the profession. Making gadgets and making a self driving car require a different mind-set. The fir…

>When someone seriously suggests to 'reinvent the wheel' it is time to re-focus. Goodyear released spherical wheels. It's not that stupid at all to reinvent the wheel, sometimes: https://www.sciencealert.com/watch-goodyear-unveils-the-futu...

They made a little PR thing. That's far from "releasing" anything.

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

#352

Post by Turing_Machine »

lmm wrote: post #239
Turing_Machine wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Trains and buses are much more efficient at moving people than individual cars, even if they're self-driving." I've said this on here before, but I'll say it again: efficiency is not everything . Individual houses (or even apartments) are less efficient than having everybody living in barracks, hot-bunking the beds in three shifts, and eating some sort of nutrient-balanced kibble in cafeterias. Human beings have goa…

> Individual houses (or even apartments) are less efficient than having everybody living in barracks, hot-bunking the beds in three shifts, and eating some sort of nutrient-balanced kibble in cafeterias. Efficient at what? The comment you replied to explicitly talked about what's "efficient at moving people". Of course some people like cars for reasons other than how good they are at getting from A to B, but is that…

"Efficient at what?"

Efficient in terms of resource usage, which is exactly how the comment I replied to was using it.

"but is that a matter of fundamental human needs, or something more like fashion?"

I'm pretty sure that being able to go where you want, any time you want, in a conveyance that doesn't smell like urine, isn't just a "fashion".

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

#353

Post by neospice »

Matt3o12_ wrote: post #234
IBM wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“Shelved” is an accurate word, but I think many people have interpreted it as meaning that Apple has given up on designing its own vehicles. My understanding is that it’s more like “Let’s get the autonomous shit down first, and worry about designing vehicles to put it in after that.” Eat the steak one bite at a time rather than all at once.

I don’t get why Apple would do that. They have enough employees who are capable of doing both in parallel. Furthermore, the talent capable of creating autonomous software are not the kind of people who excel at designing the vehicle itself. Apple could easily be doing both so that they have either one ready at the time of the release (and if one team fails, they could buy the self driving part from another company).

> They have enough employees who are capable of doing both in parallel.

Number of employees isn't what determines whether it's deliverable or not. It's likely they're deferring a decision to design the rest of the car until they're certain that they can do autonomous

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

#354

Post by skgoa »

iiiggglll wrote: post #182

> Even though Apple had not ironed out many of the basics, like how the autonomous systems would work, a team had already started working on an operating system software called CarOS. There was fierce debate about whether it should be programmed using Swift, Apple’s own programming language, or the industry standard, C++. Wow. Few things guarantee success like starting off a project with a good old-fashioned language…

We mostly use C and not C++ in the automotive industry BTW.

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

#355

Post by skgoa »

suprfnk wrote: post #221
hueving wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla's are not self-driving cars in the sense of revolutionizing any driving. You still have to pay attention and be ready to take over all of the time. That means you can't sleep, read emails, etc. on your commute. It's a fancy lane assist that reduces mundane movements you have to make and it improves safety, but it's not resulting in super cheap automated taxis or overnight road trips.

This just depends on what you classify as 'self-driving'. https://www.sae.org/news/3544/ Ofcourse, the lower levels of automation will be reached first.

That's like saying that a half empty glass counts as a certain kind of full glass.

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

#356

Post by Jyaif »

nradov wrote: post #307
ars wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you massively increase the PSI so that the tire stays spherical. If you keep the PSI at normal levels the contact patch will be exactly the same size as it is now, and the tire will deform on the bottom. So just design it to be extra flexible.

No that's not how it works. Look at a regular car tire. It's basically flat perpendicular to the direction of travel so the entire width of the tire is in contact with the ground. With a spherical tire the sides bend up away from the ground and only a single point is in contact. In order to get a larger contact patch you would have to run much lower tire pressure leading to worse handling, higher fuel consumption, an…

The surface contact of perfect cylinder (a regular car tire), and a perfect sphere (the iTire) is the same: 0 cm^2.

From that fact, you are saying that "obviously" the deformation of a cylinder (with some diameter/width ratio) filled with gaz at a certain pressure against a flat surface will lead to a higher surface than a sphere with the same pressure?

It's not obvious at all. Give me math+physics proof or GTFO.

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

#357

Post by bluGill »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #195
valuearb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a high margin, high ROE, low capital requirements business like Apple invest in a low margin, poor ROE, high capital requirements business like a car maker? Besides being a poor investment that would lock up lots of their capital, it would also create a ton of management distractions. If they are serious about building self-driving cars, they are probably making a huge mistake. Cars have been a poor busines…

Electric will drive down the per-mile cost of the vehicles, and autonomous will drive up the per-hour use of the vehicles, which will lead to a larger potential margin. You can sell a car for a lot more if it's being rented out for 12 driving hours per day. Especially so if it's a high end experience. People have a hard time shelling out $60,000 for a car when they could get something pretty adequate for $30,000, but…

It won't work that way though. Cities have this thing called "rush hour" for a reason: a some specific times of the day far more people need to get around than others.

Worse, the people who use their car in the middle of the day are the least likely to use shared cars. They are the most likely to need a change of clothing, a stroller in their car just in case. They are also the most likely to run back and for from their car for each purchase at the mall.

What that leaves is people going to/from work, and their lunch breaks. At this point you may as well own your own car self driving car: at worst it is not much more expensive (shared might be 10% cheaper), and you get to leave your golf clubs in the car while at work. At best you can ignore a few tears and keep the car for longer making owning your own car cheaper than a shared car which needs to maintain appearance and cleanliness standards.

Shared cars work well for those people who rarely use a car. However those are the people who already are renting cars, using taxis and the like for the few times they need a car.

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

#358

Post by iamgopal »

They should be more focused on iPhone and related stuff, and invest a million here and there in such self driving companies. One of them is going to be successful, or many. And after car being driven automatically, people will be using smartphone more, hence win win. And with VR, AR, 3D scanning etc, we are very far from reaching epitome of mobile technology anyway.

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

#359

Post by jordache »

tambourine_man wrote: post #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. Lida…

>Project Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed silently.

Another example of apple putting too much emphasize on fluff... who cares about the door mechanism when the company doesn't know how to build the car it bolts to.

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

#360

Post by ars »

nradov wrote: post #307
ars wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you massively increase the PSI so that the tire stays spherical. If you keep the PSI at normal levels the contact patch will be exactly the same size as it is now, and the tire will deform on the bottom. So just design it to be extra flexible.

No that's not how it works. Look at a regular car tire. It's basically flat perpendicular to the direction of travel so the entire width of the tire is in contact with the ground. With a spherical tire the sides bend up away from the ground and only a single point is in contact. In order to get a larger contact patch you would have to run much lower tire pressure leading to worse handling, higher fuel consumption, an…

Yes, that is actually how it works.

    Weight of car / Contact patch / number of wheels = PSI + strength of sidewall.
Doesn't matter if it's a cylinder or a sphere, the equation doesn't change.

PSI literally means: Pounds per square inch. Pounds of car per square inch of contact patch.

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