101–110 of 118 posts
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Maybe. I'm not aware of much precedent for the idea that statistically safer X leads to fewer safety regs for X. Maybe you could draw a parallel with the over-the-counterization of various pharmaceuticals, but I'm not sure that's an analogy that would fill me with hope.
High speed rail relies on active safety. The carriages do not meet the crashworthiness standards of conventional rail.
All the major manufacturers have announced programs for self-driving cars except Fiat/Chrysler. They mention Ford which has stated they will be in production by 2019.
Now I would suppose if Ford, GM, Mercedes, Toyoto or any of the Chinese car makers were to have their software fail Apple might be an awfully nice fallback.
FYI Ford learned massively from its problems with Microsoft's Sync technology. All the engineers knew it would be a complete disaster but that news wasn't passed up to the execs. Now engineers have been brought into the process.
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/ford/2016/10...
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> Building cars is a low-margin business. So is building phones.
Not for Apple.[1] Margins on iPhones are huge. [1] http://fortune.com/2016/04/04/apple-iphone-se-3/
Making cars, while a hard problem, isn't as hard as making cars self driving. Seems sensible to master the second first.
Making cars, while a hard problem, isn't as hard as making cars self driving. Seems sensible to master the second first.
Agreed. Let's pretend that Apple released a car two years from now, that in true Apple fashion is highly polished, but does not include some sort of self driving functionality while their competitors do. I doubt in that scenario that Apple's car efforts would fare well as self driving is going to change the way we think about cars.
Since he was also in the Korean Marines, I trust his judgement.
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> Apple has a problem with leadership. When managers aren't buying into a vision, mostly because it's murky at best, that is a big problem. That's the inverse of what would actually be a big problem: managers BUYING into a "murky at best" vision. > SV hubris believing you can go into any industry and disrupt the incompetent incumbents is laughable. Isn't that what people said about music players and then about phones…
> Isn't that what people said about music players and then about phones? No.
Palm CEO in 2006 Ed Colligan, about the upcoming Apple iPhone: “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
Dell CEO Kevin Rollins, after Dell had released the Dell DJ Ditty (lol) mp3 player: "So this [the iPod] might be an interesting new product but I’m not really believing this is going to turn the industry upside down." (...) ""Apple's created a niche. If you look at the grand scheme of things, this quarter we are supposed to achieve something like $13.5 billion in revenue. Apple's in the $2.4 billion (region), so the size and scale is not even in the same league."
Creative's CEO about Apple's iPod new model circa 2005: "I think the whole industry will just laugh at it, because the flash people — it’s worse than the cheapest Chinese player. Even the cheap, cheap Chinese brand today has display and has FM. They don’t have this kind of thing, and they expect to come out with a fight; I think it’s a non-starter to begin with."
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There's a lot of steel in today's cars that won't be needed if they're optimized for moving commuters around cities one or two at a time.
Even more than that, if cars don't crash, they don't have to be crashworthy. BMW's concept motorcycle concept makes that point: If autonomous vehicles mean that road crashes become very rare, as other rare as, say, accidental strangulation in bed, you won't need a helmet to ride. A vehicle could be an minimal as a motorcycle and still be much safer than an S-class Mercedes.
The systems have suffered many failures and crashes over the years, due mostly to poor maintenance and gross mismanagement.
Now the agency is under pressure from government regulators to retire old cars because they are not crash worthy. I find it alarming that we would talk about rail cars being crash worthy. Why not improve the system so cars don't crash? Nonetheless, new cars are much stronger and more crash worthy.
Since there are many more possible points of failure with autonomous cars (bad roads, non-autonomous cars being out there too, objects in the road, bad programming like that involved in the Tesla crash, etc) autonomous cars are going to have to be at least as crash worthy as Metro cars for the foreseeable future.
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What Apple does well is integrating hardware and software. I recently drove a car with lane following and adaptive curse control and it kind of sucked. Lane following needed great road conditions so it failed miserably. But, while adaptive cruse control was nice in heavy traffic, it was also clearly tacked on. The acceleration and deceleration was felt jerky. People can generally drive really smoothly in traffic so w…
I'm also not sure that I believe that there is a transferable organizational expertise between integrating hardware and software on mobile phones and integrating hardware and software on self-driving cars. Seriously, what does that look like? What are the attributes of a person who is good at integrating hardware and software on a phone, and who also is good at integrating hardware and software on a self-driving car?…
The best example I can give is stuttering when you drag stuff around. Android phones had issues for years with this because it's not really a hardware or software issue it's both. Eventually you can throw enough processing power to make this go away, but being a few years ahead of that curve is the kind of thing people will pay a premium for. Ed: It's the kind of issue you can't just point at one group and say fix this.
PS: That said, I don't think an iCar is a good idea right now. We seem to be in the Palm pilot stage of self driving cars, give it 15 years and apple could make a killing, but it's still a little early.
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Low margin? Uber collects ~20% from the cost of every trip taken. Given the hypothetical that full autonomy is a solved problem, A premium robotaxi service could readily command Apple-grade profit margins. The barriers to entry are insanely high, of course, and that places Apple amongst a handful of companies with the resources to clear those barriers. Autonomous vehicle pioneers have recently amended their expectati…
> Given the hypothetical that full autonomy is a solved problem lol
Roads are tough. Sometimes they're covered in snow, ice, rain with poor visibility. Sometimes they're well constructed, other times they're in disrepair. That's just the technical side of the issue.
The social side (at least in the US) is much more difficult. In the foreseeable future, any AV will have to share the road with "classic" cars, driven by humans of modest computing power. Trying to anticipate how they will interact should be interesting to say the least. And in our hyper-litigious and hyper-protective society, the clash between AVs and traditional cars will be difficult to resolve.