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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

#241

Post by lmm »

freehunter wrote: post #116
Apocryphon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You raise good points, but they're specific to American urban design, and the long-term solution is probably to redesign and rebuild our cities to move away from those designs.

So the solution is to tear down our cities, abandon our homes, and rebuild everything somewhere else. Gotcha. I mean that's probably environmentally friendly, right?

Cities and homes should not be expected to last forever; while we shouldn't be rebuilding them every year, doing so every few decades is probably more environmentally friendly than not.

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

#242

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

admiralpumpkin wrote: post #178
ctdonath wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 servi…

Apple's forte, above anyone's, is merging software and hardware. Level 5 autonomous cars align perfectly with their core competency.

No, Apple's strength is refining, polishing, blending, and packaging existing electronic and software technologies.

Cars are more about mechanical engineering than electronics or software. Learning automotive design from scratch when you have no experience and barely any trained staff is not a trivial task.

Worse, a Level 5 autonomous car is not an existing consumer technology. At this point there's nothing to refine, and barely anything that could be bought in to start the refinement process.

Apple might as well go into house building, farming, or food products.

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

#243

Post by froo »

hueving wrote: post #192
froo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given there are auto manufacturers[1] that already exist with self driving cars, I'm going to go ahead and say its not a meme and more just a technology in the process of being fully realised. Some times, things just take time. Especially when you're trying to create machines capable of not killing the general public. [1] https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

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.

Did you not watch the video?

I call a car that is cornering, accelerating/braking, actively dealing with traffic and finally parking itself a self driving vehicle.

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

#244

Post by lmm »

slackoverflower wrote: post #11
mozumder wrote: 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.

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.

That would be terrible if it were to happen; it would mean either sprawling, inhumane cities or small settlements that are awful to live in if you don't conform to the norm. Possibly both. Personal vehicles just take up far too much land.

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

#245

Post by piyush_soni »

dragontamer wrote: post #230
robertlagrant wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only new thing was a capacitive touchscreen, which allowed more responsiveness to a touch input. It just came along at the right time.

Capacitive screens were less responsive than resistive screens. The difference was that you used your physical finger instead of a stylus. Personally speaking, I preferred resistive screens for their responsiveness and accuracy. The capacitive screen was needed for "pinch to zoom" and other gestures of the modern era. The delay in the UI compared to resistive screens (as well as the higher-CPU time required for proce…

Is there some more information on that? I believed so far (or the industry made me believe) that capacitive screens were much faster than the resistive ones.

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

#246

Post by usrusr »

josteink wrote: post #162
hallmark wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have the iPhone because Apple was so ambitious. Imagine if they had just partnered with existing phone manufacturers rather than trying to build a magic touch slate. Wait, we do know what would have happened - the Motorola ROKR, which everyone should be forgiven for forgetting.

> We have the iPhone because Apple was so ambitious. When you say that, you conventiently forget that Apple re -invented the smartphone. It was an proven thing, which already sold in spades in the tech/enterprise market. They took something which existed and was awkward to use, and re-did the UI layer of the whole thing. They refined something else which was already proven. They didn't invent something original from…

> They took something which existed and was awkward to use

This is the key difference: people already love their cars, more than they love their home and more than they love their iPhone. The enjoyable smartphone was an unsolved problem, the enjoyable car has been comically over-solved for decades.

Everything unpleasant about cars is happening to the outside. Not just to pedestrians, cyclists and residents, but also to other drivers: just imagine how much nicer your commute would be without all the other commuters. A Lada on an open road would be more enjoyable than a Rolls Royce in a traffic jam. It's a commons problem, one that cannot be designed away with cute UI and expensive surface finishing. Even self-driving won't really solve that, as anyone who has been a passenger in gridlock should know. The only way to significantly improve transport is by making it more space-efficient by cooperation. Public transit with the Apple doover? Could be amazing, but it's just not in the Apple DNA. Autonomous cars with extreme platooning? Massive potential, but just like with public transit, the biggest benefit goes to those who refuse to cooperate and stick to individualistic reaping of the benefits of lower congestion.

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

#247

Post by tim333 »

amelius wrote: post #227

Transportation is becoming a service rather than a product. There is no room for a Veblen good in a market of non-owners.

In the future perhaps, not just now https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/02/ferrari-race-secon...

Though I expect in the future some people will still want fancy cars

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

#248

Post by lmm »

freehunter wrote: post #42
jamestimmins wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 are great at moving people to train stations. Buses are great at moving people to bus stops. Cars are great at moving people to their homes and businesses. When millions of Americans live in rural or suburban areas, what do you think is easier? Extending rail and bus routes to within walking distance of every house, or convincing everyone to move to a city? The answer is neither, and that's why cars exist. Her…

> When millions of Americans live in rural or suburban areas, what do you think is easier? Extending rail and bus routes to within walking distance of every house, or convincing everyone to move to a city? The answer is neither, and that's why cars exist.

My generation is moving into the cities where we can live without cars, no convincing needed.

> Here's one that isn't a trick question: is it more efficient to build a rail line to my office and have a train run there or to have individual cars drive there? I don't know the answer for sure, but considering you may possibly need 15 trains filled mainly with people who don't work there converging on one location or 15 cars with one person each who does work there converging on one location, I'm almost willing to bet 15 electric cars would be more efficient than 15 trains.

If your office is in the middle of nowhere, sure, but that's a "don't do that then" problem. If you turn over all the space that's currently spent on roads, road verges, and parking lots to more productive uses, you can cluster a bunch of places within easy walking distance of a train station - offices, restaurants, entertainment, and housing - and then people can live near where they work and enjoy.

Of course people who want to live in the middle of nowhere will probably always need something like cars, but they shouldn't be allowed to spoil it for the rest of us. Charge them a fair market price for the land they use for parking, and a road toll that covers the rent the road could earn if built on, rather than having everyone else subsidise those things.

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

#249

Post by majjam »

jacquesm wrote: post #240
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…

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…

Here's a link to the relevant HHGTTG quote: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...

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

#250

Post by tim333 »

likelynew wrote: post #53
ianai wrote: post #13

Call me crazy but why not consider ways to let someone remote drive the vehicle? I'm sure there are all sorts of corner cases (bad signal for one) but it's done all the time with drones.

How will it solve anything?

The car could go autonomous 99.9% of the time but have a human take over if something weird happens. For deliveries and the like.
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