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Apple Car Design Goals: No Steering Wheel or Brake Pedal, Flat Seats for Sleeping, Large Screens, and More
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The Apple Car will introduce a breakthrough self-driving technology called AIRTIRES.
(sorry) 🚗
(sorry) 🚗
car prototype on an episode of Mr. Bean…
What you (or anyone else here) feels isn‘t reality. Again I call BS on ONE person being able to make a decision on what keyboards would be in Apple laptops or how many ports they would have. Apple has a whole product marketing team responsible for determining features/configurations/pricing for products. To think Ive said Mac laptops will now have crappy keyboards with limited ports and everyone else said OK Jony you’re the boss is laughable. It’s like when Phil Schiller got on stage to announce the trash can Mac Pro and said “can’t innovate my a**”. That wasn’t about form over function. It was Apple making a bet about the future of high end computing and getting it wrong.
Not even in the same league. Planes move at 700+ miles per hour in 3D space and can weigh almost 150,000 lbs. I'm sure you an imagine a crash at 700 mph at 30,000 ft with 100 people is a lot more problematic than a vehicle that typically moves 80+ mph and in 2D space.
Bingo. It's hilarious to see all the negative comments or the tired joke of thinking that Siri is the same thing as a hard, realtime, computing system that is used in autonomous vehicles or even in engine management.
I doubt the Apple Car will come this decade but at some point in the near future, driverless cars will become so common, safe and ubiquitous that insurance companies won't even insure human drivers anymore either—it'll be way too risky. You won't be able to drive yourself and that's a good thing.
Most people clearly don't even want to drive, they'd rather text, play a game, etc. Too many idiots on the road have already ruined driving for everyone else. Transportation is a means to an end for most people.
Human drivers:
- Fall asleep / drive impaired / drunk / distracted
- Only have 2 eyes that see one direction
- Respond in 250 ms (about 1/4 second)
- Weren't designed for / evolved for driving at high rates of speed
- Biased and emotional (road rage)
- Never fall sleep
- Can use multiple sensors at once and in 360° (GPS, wheel/suspension, camera, radar/lidar, etc.)
- Respond in 1 ms
- Programmed for the task at hand
- Rational / non-biased
We're not there yet but the writing is on the wall.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Maybe the car is something you buy in VR (goggles), much like apparently Meta is going to sell virtual clothing inside VR. The VR car can never crash and even pass directly through other cars/walls/mountains/oceans. The VR car can bend the seats so that passengers facing each other can also see the seat-back screens in this rumor. The VR car can dynamically morph into one with virtual brakes, 2 steering wheels, any shape, any color, any style, etc. Virtual flats can be repaired with the purchase of new virtual tires which self install (for a fee). Virtual tune-up services can auto-bill the Apple Card.
Apple VR car can thus arrive when googles/glasses arrive. Siri can still be dumb as rocks but eventually get you to any destination by simply trying up to all of them until you finally arrive. Maps can drive VR car right off cliffs or right into oceans with no actual consequence. Solo car riders can ride in the carpool lane and/or create their own dedicated lane. Etc.
While I'm mostly joking, if a launch in 2025 is real, does this not seem like the most likely way?
And if so, be ready for the Apple Private Jet, Apple Yacht, Apple Star Ship, etc in rapid succession. And save your dollars... a LOT of dollars... because while the car/jet/yacht/star ship may only be VR imagination, the money required to buy them will be the most tangible type.
Apple VR car can thus arrive when googles/glasses arrive. Siri can still be dumb as rocks but eventually get you to any destination by simply trying up to all of them until you finally arrive. Maps can drive VR car right off cliffs or right into oceans with no actual consequence. Solo car riders can ride in the carpool lane and/or create their own dedicated lane. Etc.
While I'm mostly joking, if a launch in 2025 is real, does this not seem like the most likely way?
And if so, be ready for the Apple Private Jet, Apple Yacht, Apple Star Ship, etc in rapid succession. And save your dollars... a LOT of dollars... because while the car/jet/yacht/star ship may only be VR imagination, the money required to buy them will be the most tangible type.
Even if it came with a steering wheel and brake pedals, you can't see outside because it won't come with Windows™.😏
Wake me when they come up with 1/8-1/4 sized prototype that can be remotely controlled. Give it four wheel steering while they're at it.🥳 Parallel parking would be a piece of cake. 3-point turning a thing of the past😁, but then so would drifting.🥺
I'm just imagining how this will be if the previous occupant was drunk and vomited on the seats or a car full of young adults who had just been to a drive-thru at a fast food place. Or people who believe their trash is other people's problems when they throw it out the window while driving or clean out their car by tossing everything out the door in a parking lot (no need to now because it becomes the next occupant's problem).
Yes a driverless car will arrive, passengers just have to ignore the odor of the used diaper someone left on the floor in the back seats and the “FU Biznatch” scratched on the plastic dashboard panel. Its hard for some to imagine, but the rest of the world is not at all like the confines of the Apple Campus in Cupertino.
swingerofbirch
macrumors 68040
I think they're overestimating how much people like seeing each other.
I mean can you imagine in your living room putting two sofas facing each other that close?
I mean can you imagine in your living room putting two sofas facing each other that close?
Yes. What i the point of a steering whel in a self drive car. A wheel implies their is a driver that must look out the window. What Apple wants is to turn the front seat around to face the rear and maybe even allow the "driver" to take a nap while the car drives itself.No steering wheels and brake pedals?
What are we supposed to rely on? Siri???
Google almost does this with their driverless taxies. the passenger sits in the rear seat and there is no one in the driver seat. The car drives itself. Why does it still have a steering wheel if there is no one using it? Only because they are retrofitting an existing car. But if you build the car from the ground up, why not turn the front seat to the rear?
In fact why even ride in the car. I could send a car like this to Walmart's curbside pickup. the Walmart guy places my items iin the trunk and the car drives home. I do not need to be inside the car. Same thing when the car goes to the car wash. Why do I need to be there, the car can drive itself.
Finally if I need to pickup my 8 year old kid from school. Why do I need to be there. I can send the car and the kid can play video games while the car takes him to some place. In this case I DO NOT WANT a steering wheel or the kid might try to use it.
This is all 10 to 20 years away. No one will buy these cars. Apple will sell you a subscription service where yu pay many $800 a month and always have access to a car. Or for $400 you maybe have to wait 30 minutes for a car.
The amount of times my Apple devices have hard locked and required a complicated reset to resume being functional makes me supremely distrustful of a car... that you might have to hard reset, on a freeway, while traveling 75mph.
Bio-technology is the only way to make this project succeed. Grow bio-swappable driving-brains to control and manipulate your vehicle. Imagine, owning a library of driving-brains from advanced F1 race car skills to oldster Floridian driving skills. Computer hardware is so last-century, let's leap forward instead. /s
/s
If this is aimed at city driving, then why would anyone need to lie down and sleep? Surely traffic congestion isn't that bad?
Already available, and self-maintaining to boot. They are called cab drivers.Bio-technology is the only way to make this project succeed. Grow bio-swappable driving-brains to control and manipulate your vehicle. Imagine, owning a library of driving-brains from advanced F1 race car skills to oldster Floridian driving skills. Computer hardware is so last-century, let's leap forward instead.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
"I don't know what you mean by Jesus take the wheel. Here's what I found on the internet for Jesus take the wheel"
"No please, stop the car"
"I don't know what you mean by no please stop the car. Here's what I found on the internet for no please stop the car."
"We gotta get out of here"
"To listen to We gotta get out of this place by the Animals, you need an Apple Music Subscription. Would you like one?"
"No"
"Charging an Apple Music subscription to your Apple Pay account. Thank you for your subscription."
Music begins to play.
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"Siri.. Uhhh.. Stop before you hit this tree."No steering wheels and brake pedals?
What are we supposed to rely on? Siri???
So they patent door hinges, and modular body panels, suspension components and a couple hundred other things, all to improve Car Play, for which they would get about $20-100 a vehicle license fee from manufacturers who would rather use their own control software to begin with.
Human driven cars are the #1 cause of death in people under 40.
World-wide, human driver cars kill over ONE MILLION people every year. This is like a small city wiped of the Earth every year. If any other product killed a million people a year, it would be banned and the makers would be in jail.
Could you imagine the uproar if iPhones exploded in your face and "only" killed 10,000 people. Apple would be sued and be gone. But cars kill 100 times that many people, year in and year out.
We suspect the self drive cars would be 1000 times safer than human driven cars and "only" kill 1,000 people. The big reason is the car will not speed, will not run lights and never gets drunk. Remember that HALF of all drives have below median driving skill.
Humans drivers have set the bar SO LOW that computers don't need to be perfect to be 100X better.
As said, the #1 cause of death for younger people is cars. (Then cancer, heart attacks and strokes as you get older.) Humans n average are horrible at driving cars, doing better than horrible is all Apple has to do.
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There are lots of technical/ethical questions linked to the self-driving car. But my concern with the above description is quite different. Will the experience be enjoyable ?
And this is easy to test: have a closed box, the size of a car interior, build inside a train. Yes, a regular train. And then put the people as they would be in the car, facing each other, with big screens. And move the train. I am afraid that it will be quite uncomfortable, some will have motion sickness... and remember, that's just a train on rails, this is much quieter than a car in traffic.
And this is easy to test: have a closed box, the size of a car interior, build inside a train. Yes, a regular train. And then put the people as they would be in the car, facing each other, with big screens. And move the train. I am afraid that it will be quite uncomfortable, some will have motion sickness... and remember, that's just a train on rails, this is much quieter than a car in traffic.