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Apple Spent More Than $10 Billion on Apple Car Before Canceling Project
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$10 billion is not much considering the ambitious aim. I think they did not invest enough to make a dent in the car industry. How much R&D is the car industry using per year? A quick google search suggests 145 billion euro in 2022.
Sometimes I get tired of IT companies that display arrogance by entering fields they have no clue about. A car is one example and tries to do clinical grade diagnostics is another (AW). IT companies understand the IT side but not the messy physical reality and in general have no clue about safety aspects and performance requirements that are central for succeeding in the intended market.
Sometimes I get tired of IT companies that display arrogance by entering fields they have no clue about. A car is one example and tries to do clinical grade diagnostics is another (AW). IT companies understand the IT side but not the messy physical reality and in general have no clue about safety aspects and performance requirements that are central for succeeding in the intended market.
I comprehend just fine:
NYT said:
NYT said:
NYT said:
Changing direction on a project like this is normal-- rescoping, studying, learning, figuring out what unique value you can provide in a crowded market. Yes they pivoted around a bit looking for a good formula, but autonomy as an objective was pretty constant. Surely you've seen pictures of the sensor package they outfitted these things with?
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Once the world comes to the realisation that full self drive requires either dedicated lanes or that all vehicles need to be self drive then Apple will be well placed to provide some sort of vehicle. As it stands, you can’t mix AI and meatbags on the same roads.
I really don’t think anything in that article can be characterized as “normal” but whatever. It isn’t a battle worth fighting. The piece speaks for itself.
Scarcity of the resources needed to make enough lithium batteries, alternative battery tech not advancing fast enough, and a few years of crazy inflation driving up the costs of all the other materials you need to build a car and the charging infrastructure to support them.
What planet r u guys on, here in phx we have Waymo driverless cars EVERYWHERE. Stop talking like it isn’t possible, it’s here now 😊
The infrastructure path to autonomy is a dead end. I've watched initiative after initiative in this space: V2I, V2V, V2X... If we can get real time position to the centimeter, if we have hyper-accurate maps, if we have gigabit upload speeds to the cloud.
It's never going to be perfect enough. The world is huge and always in flux. If you defined the perfect infrastructure, first it would bankrupt a nation to create it, then the first phase would be in need of replacement before the last phase was done.
Humans are perfectly capable of navigating the infrastructure that we have with two bad eyes and half a brain while managing fighting children, texting, and thinking about how we'd tell off our boss if only we'd thought of it at the time.
One critical piece of infrastructure that's widely deployed? Sirens and flashing lights-- yet Teslas keep hitting firetrucks.
We don't need better infrastructure, we need better software. It's just not there and we don't yet know how to create it.
Interviewing 6 people who worked on the project over the past decade, who have an ax to grind and want to say they knew it would fail all along? It belongs in the gossip column.
What makes you think they “have an axe to grind” and “want to say that they knew it would fail”?
Hmmm... No weather. No hills. The kind of wide, regular road grid only found in a young desert city. Mostly low rise architecture. Vehicles carrying probably close to a quarter million dollars in sensor equipment on their roof. And still a less than great record.
"Does Waymo drive on the freeway?
So far, Waymo vehicles only drive on freeways with a Waymo employee in the car."
Driverless cars stalled on Phoenix area roadways aren't malfunctioning. That's how they're designed
Waymo releases few details about operations for its autonomous vehicles in metro Phoenix, including the exact number of vehicles on Valley streets.
www.azcentral.com
That in itself is a problem:
A Cruise robotaxi dragged a pedestrian in S.F. Now we know why the car didn’t stop
UPDATE: Cruise lays off contract workers responsible for maintaining its robotaxis For weeks, a key question surrounding the Oct. 2 crash involving a Cruise robotaxi remained unanswered: Why did the driverless vehicle continue to drive, trying to pull over, while a woman was pinned under its...
www.msn.com
Don't get me wrong, this is a hard problem and we're making incremental progress, but we are a long, long way from driving home on a snowy winter night in Chicago.
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Price of progress is overpriced products and planned obsolescence. Apple has mastered this.
A company selling products isn’t the same as a government collecting taxes. Apple charges as much as it can justify from consumers and budgets R&D costs from the profits. Your iPhone would still cost the same without this project, except the profits would just have gone to stock buybacks instead.
Apple finally realized the direction the wind is blowing with this one and it’s not the direction they want to go.
Can anyone image Elon who promotes and amplifies white nationalists working for Apple. He would have demanded to be CEO by claiming that only he could run Apple. Dodged a bullet there.
These companies were overly ambitious and now it’s biting them. Apple learned a valuable lesson and that lesson is there are some roads you shouldn’t take, especially if you see other companies not doing well on those roads.
Even if we ignore Elon’s politics, it would have been a bad fit culturally. Tesla is more of a engineering driven, push a product out and worry about quality issues and hot fixes later kind of company, while Apple tend to have more of designers take the lead over engineers kind of approach and tries to have more polish on the products they launch. Tesla’s approach can produce some quirky and fun features, but it’s often not as well thought out.
I said very early on that fully autonomous driving was a red herring. If Apple had simply designed a really good looking EV, with the best-in-class infotainment system and networking, with some modern eco-friendly materials, I think people would have been just as interested. Think Polestar‘s clean and minimalist design, but a bit sleeker. Apple continues to over-think stuff.
Jobs chose Cook as the best person to take over from him.
I’d love to see, just for the lols, a calculation of how much ‘carbon’ was spent alongside that $10bn. Probably enough to power a small country for a year 😂
The $10 billion is not necessarily a waste, more so when you generate almost $400 billion in revenue annually. When you're a company at that scale you have to take risks. The vast majority of that money is money spent on R&D, and a lot of what they learnt will prove useful in other ways (both in terms of inspiring positive changes to other products and saving them from future rabbit holes).
What would have been a waste is if they took things further from R&D into production, and this then flopped really badly, but cutting it before production, is a very positive sign - they've explored the problem, learned a lot, generated IP and decided it's not something they'll profit from further by building a production line around it to ship a product to consumers.