Apple Car History - Where Did Development Go Wrong?

[Onelifenofear]

Seems he was right.

Well it's not rocket science.... Tesla, Fisker, Rivian, Lucid, Canoo are are all having a damn good go with varying success and without 2.8 Trillion behind them.

The issue is.. is it worth the Effort. Is it the right thing to do. Most companies are making old school cars. Apple was thinking autonomous, and that is genuinely hard if not impossible for for the foreseeable... might vaguely work in the USA. I'd like to see it just get up a normal, ducking and in and out of park cars in London.

The thing that depresses me is 93-95% of all cars are parked at any given time - and that's day time hours. It's 99% at night.

We don't need more cars... we need BETTER Uber or Rental cars. I need a big car today. Bring me one. I'll drive it I may have it for 3 days.. then I need a tiny car for a few day. etc.

I have a Tesla Y and a Mini diesel... I currently need the bigger car as I have kids... I did without a car for 10 years in London... Taxis' uber and Trains, and My yearly outlay way about 1/6th what I pay for the one car.

 

[Onelifenofear]

btw without Robotaxi, tesla's valuation makes no sense and that's not coming anytime soon. Tesla will be stuck at level 2 for years

I don't think you've been following AI development.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

Gambling on electric when the future is hydrogen/smart fuel.

Hydrogen has ZERO future as anything but the industrial chemical and occasional rocket fuel it is today.

It will NEVER be a practical motor vehicle energy storage media.

Battery electric cars are only the future if you don't already have one today.

 

[nutritious]

I don't think you've been following AI development.

Ok go ask the engineers that work at waymo if they think level 5 is coming anytime soon. you'll be surprised at what they tell you. Elon has a false presupposition. He thinks human minds and neural nets are basically the same so with enough data, they'll be like humans and level 5 is right around the corner. Not true, human cognition and AI are nothing alike. Also if human minds worked like neural nets, it would destroy the possibility of justified knowledge claims in the epistemic sense (since that logically entails a form of determinism)

 

[DocMultimedia]

Lots of work on many fronts with AI, materials, and batteries. Team up with a car manufacturer and just get the best CarPlay Car ever released. That is all they really needed to do with all of this.

Apple stores can't sell cars.

 

[apl11203]

I love "pull an AirPower".

 

[jayducharme]

Some ‌Apple Car‌ employees will move to Apple's generative AI team, while others will be laid off or will need to apply for new positions within Apple.

I guess that's business, but I feel bad for the people who joined Apple's team to "change the world" and now will be unemployed. Maybe they'll have to resort to making sugar water.

 

[now i see it]

I think this is a reflection of the company as a whole

 

[Victor Mortimer]

Ok go ask the engineers that work at waymo if they think level 5 is coming anytime soon. you'll be surprised at what they tell you. Elon has a false presupposition. He thinks human minds and neural nets are basically the same so with enough data, they'll be like humans and level 5 is right around the corner. Not true, human cognition and AI are nothing alike. Also if human minds worked like neural nets, it would destroy the possibility of justified knowledge claims in the epistemic sense (since that logically entails a form of determinism)

So, I think level 4 is a reasonable goal for the fairly near future. The problem is that everybody working on it is screwing around with robotaxi nonsense, when what it really needs to be is built into normal cars. And the goal shouldn't really be urban centers, it should be highways and the occasional "car, take me home" as a way to eliminate DUIs. It doesn't have to work everywhere all the time, it's not a huge problem if it can't drive in the snow. But interstate driving is BORING, a car that lets me take a nap between charging stops isn't that hard to do with current technology.

But to really be successful it's going to have to be built into the car, not another subscription. And it's got to let me take control if I want to throw the car around the twisty windys.

Urban centers already have a better solution: Public transit.

 

[yustas]

Can they now fix bugs from 10 years ago? And maybe make a ring?

 

[H.E. Pennypacker]

For starters Apple is not an automotive manufacturer. You can’t be good at everything.

 

[Zwhaler]

Where did it go wrong?

Hmm maybe it started with them not being in the car business.

 

[tgara]

I think Apple finally realized the realities of the EV market, specifically that demand for electric cars has been and will remain soft and that people are realizing that these EVs might not meet their needs. Add to that the high cost, pathetic infrastructure for charging, and limited range, cold weather issues, and it’s no surprise that Apple pulled the plug on development (no pun intended). Frankly I’m glad they put this rumor and whatever development they have been doing, to rest. I don’t blame Apple for giving it a go, perhaps it made sense at one point in the past, but the market and economic realities have changed and now they can focus on their main computing products.

 

[mrr]

The electric automobile marketplace changed. Why bring a low margin product to a limited market?

 

[Zwhaler]

I think Apple finally realized the realities of the EV market, specifically that demand for electric cars has been and will remain soft and that people are realizing that these EVs might not meet their needs. Add to that the high cost, pathetic infrastructure for charging, and limited range, cold weather issues, and it’s no surprise that Apple pulled the plug on development (no pun intended). Frankly I’m glad they put this rumor and whatever development they have been doing, to rest. I don’t blame Apple for giving it a go, perhaps it made sense at one point in the past, but the market and economic realities have changed and now they can focus on their main computing products.

This. They were jumping on EV's when it was a profitable trend to pursue for companies with infinite funding (just like how AI has become the new buzzword), but now that the honeymoon period of that fantasy is over, they're not so hot about the long-term relationship. The gravitation towards trends (subscription everything, AR headsets, EVs and Smart Rings) is one aspect of the new Apple that I don't particularly care for. It doesn't seem like Apple is purely leading as much as they used to, but sort of "following" what they think investors might want first.

 

[coolfactor]

Blame the boneheads that crash their Teslas while using self-driving incorrectly. Apple doesn't want to be having to deal with deaths and lawsuits because people break the rules at 80+ km/h.

 

[I7guy]

Seems he was right.

There was something prescient about that as to where GM is with BEVs today.

 

[I7guy]

This is a very simple question

Apple has turned into an evil corpse company and no other company wants to work with Apple. Apple wants to dictate everything from the price it pays for manufacturing to the conditions it sets if another company like BMW wants to use an AppleOS.

But Apple itself can't make a car. It has no idea about a chassis and underestimates the knowledge of companies like Porsche/Audi/BMW.

In the meantime, more and more cars are installing Android OS or its AOSP version without Google services. Apple has lost and one of the main reasons is its arrogance.
Apple has tormented its customers for over a decade with its MFI program and other stumbling blocks - this is now part of the receipt.

You’re right. It’s difficult to be a Tesla. Porsche Audi and bmw do not produce mainstream BEVs.

 

[Dark_Omen]

What's Cook done relevant since 2011 (13 years).

- Apple Watch (decent, but could be more innovative).
- Apple Vision Pro (won't ever be a mainstream product at its price point and lack of cellular connectivity).
- Apple Card (will eventually be a failure).
- Apple Pay (still not mainstream, as contactless cards are more popular).


Gee, the list sure is extensive . An accountant shouldn't be running the show in the the technology sector... That's why you have a CFO.


You know what we got under Steve Jobs between 2000 and 2011?

- iPhone
- iPad
- iPod
- MacBook Air (yeah a laptop, but was a breakthrough design at the time).



What should Cook have his staff do over the next five years?

- Fix the iWork Suite so it's as usable as MS Office.
- Allow Apple Vision Pro to expand to a larger market.
- Get more diabetic-related features into the Apple Watch.
- Redesign iOS and increase its ergonomic capabilities.
- Get rid of Siri entirely and come out with new artificial intelligence features.
- Improve Apple TV+ so it's worth something.

If you can't have top-notch software and hardware with everything you sell, why do you offer the product in the first place?

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

The reason the Apple TV set never happened is obvious, Apple never produced display panels.
An Apple TV set would have just been the guts of an Apple TV box stuffed into a huge aluminum and glass casing, with a Samsung or LG panel.
And it probably would’ve been $2000, and provided very little benefit over buying just a Samsung television and an Apple TV box.

Similarly, Apple should have never even thought about producing cars, and instead should have just tried providing their software and hardware expertise to existing cars already.
So…CarPlay

 

[CodeSpyder]

I don't trust that anyone will solve a fully-autonomous automobile. There's just too many random events going on out there in the wild for a vehicle to keep up with. This is just my opinion of course. Autonomous space vehicles are another story, as planet's positions and velocities are very well known.

 

[ajergome]

Apple wanted the car to be able to drive on its own on highways, but that was too ambitious. Instead, Apple settled for driver-assistance features similar to how Tesla vehicles operate, with the car offering steering and brake/acceleration support.

Teslas have driven on their own on highways, on-ramp to off-ramp with "Navigate on Autopilot" since 2019

 

[Harry Haller]

"Where did development go wrong?"
At the very beginning when it was first proposed.
Somebody who wasn't afraid of losing their job should have said it was a very bad idea, would fail, divert resources from projects that needed to be done and cost Apple unnecessary losses of billions. Apple Car was an absurd vanity project totally outside of Apple's areas of expertise and success.

 

[britboyj]

Reportedly.... according to sources... from those familiar with the matters...

This car never really existed. It was an exploratory project.

We now have electric cars that are ending up as scrap... that completely negates any environmental positives.

The whole industry and consumers need to really think about this hard.

I know one person who has been through 4 electric vehicles in 10 years. It's atrocious, an environmental catastrophe.

Someone willingly upgrading their Tesla doesn't count.

 

[picpicmac]

went wrong when tim cook was made ceo

That this idea floats around the internet tells us much about the computer-geekdom contingent.

Cook, by all measures used in business, is a good CEO.

And Steve Jobs was not. Jobs was a strong personality, which made him an impetus for a young industry. But Jobs left Apple because he was not a good CEO, he came back in desperate times, instigated some changes... and then unfortunately life was too short.