131–140 of 174 posts
In the 1910's Ford revolutionized operations management and it dominated the automotive industry. In the 1960's Toyota revolutionized operations management and it dominated the automotive industry. In the 2010's Apple revolutionized operations management and ...
Toyota never dominated anything.
And had recruiters call random people at Google, Samsung and Apple ...
I cannot quite get my head around this - Apple is an excellent engineering, sales and design company with gigantic wealth - but the leap from computers and phones into automobile is very big. They have little in common wrt. sales, technology and support.
Why would this work out? And does noone question the sanity of it?
It's probably 10 years off, but I bet it will be a self-driving one. That isn't a car anymore, but a moving computer, which makes it a natural fit for Apple.
I'm skeptical. Self-driving systems are extremely software heavy, and Apple is not a software house. It just doesn't make sense.
Apple maintains one of the largest software portfolio's in the world, even Tim Cook doesn't think Apple is a hardware company and makes billions a quarter directly from its software and services:
http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-is-not-a-hardw...
That's not including the R&D that goes into developing iOS/OSX which they give away for free to complete the iPhone/iPad UX, which would be nowhere near as successful if it weren't for iOS and the optimized apps that ship with it.
"Apple would be looking to make such an enormous leap from its core competency — building great consumer electronics". Don't electric cars fall into the category of consumer electronics?
No.
Did the old film cameras fall under consumer electronics? I don't think so. What about analog telephones from the 90's? What about overhead projectors and phonograph players (I hope that's what they were called)?
Those devices have changed. I have to imagine the umbrella of 'consumer electronics' is constantly expanding. In the long term, why would cars be any different?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have loved to see Elon Musk vs. Steve Jobs. Personalities are quite contrasting.
Steve Jobs up ended multiple industries. Musk is no small player but Jobs basically reinvented the way the game was played when he entered an industry. Musk wouldn't have had a chance.
What if Volkswagen decided they wanted to do smart phones? And had recruiters call random people at Google, Samsung and Apple ... I cannot quite get my head around this - Apple is an excellent engineering, sales and design company with gigantic wealth - but the leap from computers and phones into automobile is very big. They have little in common wrt. sales, technology and support. Why would this work out? And does n…
I think eventually minivans will be a quite popular format for autonomous vehicles. Full size buses are inconvenient for suburban streets, while vehicles for single occupants may be priced out in on-demand situations for many trips. Already, minivans are very popular in unofficial public transport systems in many less-developed countries. In Morocco, grand taxis are old Mercedes sedans that leave when full - they're…
But, a minivan or SUV/CUV? Those things ride high as a preference. I bet you could put a full foot high of batteries under that design and no one would even notice a change. Look at the Outlander PHEV, for example. It's got 12 kWh of low-density batteries in the floor and they didn't have to compromise interior space at all. I've always wondered why those things weren't the first vehicles to get electrified.
I'm a little miffed that people don't express more skepticism about self-driving cars on tech sites. Given what I know about AI research and the technical limitations of LIDAR etc., I find it unlikely that fully self-driving cars will be available at any scale in our lifetimes — if at all. I wish people wouldn't talk about them like they're already de facto the future of transport. I think if Apple is working on a ca…
Could you elaborate on this? What do you know about AI research and technical limitations of various components that leads you to be skeptical of the realization of autonomous vehicles? I'm with you on predicting that if Apple is getting into it, it will be non-autonomous, but I'm curious as to how you have reached your other incredulous conclusion.
* People talk about how automatic cars have been extensively tested. That's not really true. There's only a handful of them on the roads and they've been tested in limited conditions, with particular limits placed on suburban driving (slow speeds, etc.). I suspect there will be entirely new classes of bugs when there are hundreds of different AIs competing on the road, especially when mixed with normal human traffic.
* LIDAR does not work in poor weather conditions, including ice on the road.
* In terms of AI, getting to the 90% point is relatively easy, but it seems like the last 10% would require something resembling true intelligence. How do you deal with a lack of markers on the road? Dangerous situations in shady areas? Sensor equipment getting damaged and feeding your car wrong information? Animals and children running out last-second into the road? Severe obstacles at a distance? Tiny, cramped residential roads with non-sidewalk pedestrian traffic? Accommodating emergency vehicles and police? We shut off our brains when driving 90% of the time, but that last 10% does require human levels of intelligence. Furthermore, unless every car on the road is automated, the AI in automatic cars will need to deal with the idiosyncrasies of other human drivers. Sudden merges. Speeding. Road rage. Unexpected emergencies. Tailgating. An AI can't send and receive feedback to other human drivers and pedestrians; it can only use its model of human behavior to predict likely outcomes. (And this is saying nothing of other AIs on the road, who might behave completely unlike human drivers.)
* People say that automated cars only need to drive better than human drivers, not perfectly. I don't know if that's true. If automated cars drove perfectly 99.9999% of the time but then crashed horribly that remaining 0.0001% — taking some poor pedestrians or bicyclists along with them — I wouldn't get into one. And I don't think they'd be street-legal. Most people don't want to think about human lives in terms of numbers; they'd rather have control over their actions and accept the inevitability of occasional accidents, rather than having a machine that's practically guaranteed to eat up human lives every so often.
* Speaking of which, how does the car decide who gets to live in a life-or-death situation? Are there situations where the car would elect to kill the driver? Which programmer gets to make that decision? I'd like to know this information before getting into my car, please. The idea of offloading split-second moral decisions to an AI seems like it should be severely legislated.
* People talk about mesh networking improving traffic and whatnot. I can't even get my USB devices to work across OSes half the time, and we're talking about sophisticated traffic control across multiple manufacturers? Especially given the quality of software that car companies tend to put out?
* Self-driving technology is extremely expensive, and most cars on the road are pretty cheap. You'd have to have some sort of insane subsidy program to get more than the 1% driving automated cars.
* People want to get in their self-driving cars drunk, but I think there will be severe legal hurdles in the way of that.
I think semi-automated and AI-augmented driving are certainly possible. Highways are easy enough to tackle. I could see some expensive cars getting that capability over the next few decades, as well as maybe cargo trucks. But endpoint to endpoint driving, where you could snooze on your way to work? I don't think so.
Cars are going to dictate what technology silo you end up joining. The car that works the best as a communicationpod/office will win the next major consumer battle just as Apple won the smart phone war. This is about Google not Tesla.
About winning the smartphone war, if Apple won it, that was the war for cash. Android won the war for usage, same way IE won the browser wars. I wonder what's the margin on a car. If you have to make low margin products to keep selling high margin ones you end up low margin overall. So, if Apple goes for $50+k cars, it will still be a high margin business but even more biased towards the richest consumers. If it goes for 10k cars, that will be a big change in strategy.