First Apple Car to Be Fully Autonomous and Designed to Operate Without a Driver

[ChrisA]

I wouldn’t want to be in a car where I couldn’t take control of the wheel if things go awry.

So you never ride in the passenger seat while other people drive?

But this is a common belief. Most drivers THINK they are excellent drivers. But obviously half of all drivers have lower than median level driving skills and only a very few can be "excellent". Most are slightly below or above average.

As it turns out human-driven cars are the #1 cause of death for those under about mid-40s. Human drivers have set the bar VERY low. They kill over a million people every year. If automated self-drives cars became universal and then killed 100,000 people every year we would be ten times better off. As said, Human drivers have set the bar VERY low.

 

[dannyyankou]

So you never ride in the passenger seat while other people drive?

But this is a common belief. Most drivers THINK they are excellent drivers. But obviously half of all drivers have lower than median level driving skills and only a very few can be "excellent". Most are slightly below or above average.

As it turns out human-driven cars are the #1 cause of death for those under about mid-40s. Human drivers have set the bar VERY low. They kill over a million people every year. If automated self-drives cars became universal and then killed 100,000 people every year we would be ten times better off. As said, Human drivers have set the bar VERY low.

I'm fine with being with someone else in the car as long as it's a human and there's a steering wheel that can be controlled.

 

[shapesinaframe]

iOS keyboard in general is a buggy mess and has been since at least iOS 13.

That’s when they quietly removed the shift-key capitalisation function that enabled you to change the case of a word from lowercase, to UPPERCASE to Capitalcase just by selecting the word and toggling shift.

I guess there must have been a patent issue for them to remove such a useful function.

What I find really odd is there was never any complaints about it online. I started to wonder if it was just me that it stopped working for 🤔

 

[shapesinaframe]

I’m not that good at driving on dirt trails or icy roads. Why should I care if the car can’t go where I won’t drive myself anyway?

You shouldn’t. I was just curious about how well these autonomous driving functions perform when there isn’t the structure of paved roads, painted lines, road signs and mapped roads for the software to orient itself with.

 

[iGüey]

"These will be autonomous, electric vehicles designed to operate without a driver and focused on the last mile,"

Ok, so no Apple Car until 2035 at minimum....

 

[danny842003]

Given this news about it being a robotaxi, the Hyundai-Kia partnership makes more sense. Quality doesn't need to be top notch, but price will.

Hyundai and Kia are quality but they’re built to a budget. Somethings may not feel as luxurious but that’s purely a cost saving. It’s easy to make things feel nice once the basics are solid.
I worked in an Audi franchise for a good amount of time and something feeling luxurious does not always equal quality trust me.

 

[Wilderness-1902]

Trust a company with my life?

 

[contacos]

In other words illegal on half the Globe

 

[MacGekko]

Past few weeks I've been thinking someone has been violating NDA and provide details about Apple's plan. But now that I come to think of it more, it's actually necessary that consumers know about this plan in advance.

Getting a car is a minimum 5 years plan. It only makes sense that Apple allows its customers to know their car plan in advance so that they can plan accordingly. Otherwise when the product unveils, a faithful consumer may have just acquired a new vehicle and that customer is out of reach for at least 5 years.

What do you guys think about this?

Leaking out future product details is frowned upon by any Fortune 500 company. Have we not read numerous articles detailing the obsession Apple has with protecting its future product details? CNBC's exclusive scoops have a high fail rate. Does anyone remember all the speculation about Apple's future tablet product, 99.9 percent, perhaps 100 percent of what I read on this site and many other tech sites was wrong, completely wrong.

When Apple decides to go public with their plans, I believe it will be something totally different than the CNBC news today. Over here we speculate, that is fun and interesting, but I don't expect anyone to nail down exactly what Apple intends to create.

My two cents, the Hyundai battery/300 miles is a head fake, Mark Gurman has been wrong before but I trust his sources more than CNBC, his article a few months ago claimed Apple had superior battery technology than what is out there currently, if true there is the big story.

What would drive sales right now, a battery that has a 500/600 mile range, that could charge to 80 percent two or three times faster than the current crop of batteries, a battery that costs less.

The robotaxi speculation, I think it is bunk, a much better battery, a self driving car with better software than whatever Tesla is working on, a way to integrate all of Apple's services within your personal car, the ability to capture market share in an industry with less than 5 percent of EV cars currently sold worldwide.

That is my one cent theory, probably wrong, but I'll bet my one cent over the hacks at CNBC.

 

[macintoshmac]

The second Apple car, if it comes, will come with a driver seat since by then they will realise people generally want to drive their car themselves..

This will be touted as a feature and that they "continually listen to feedback" from the public.

 

[DrV]

it seems like most folks who complaint about Hyundai/Kia "quality" are those who can't afford anything other than a used Kia from the 90's.

I think part of the problem is indeed in the definition of “quality”. Some people use it to signify reliability, others talk about the feeling (materials, design, aesthetics).

Asian manufacturers are great at making reliable cars. They are not known for the best premium feeling in the car, even though some Lexii or Genesises are quite decent.

I’d love to have a car combining Asian reliability, French comfort, Tesla’s drivetrain and German design and dynamics. But as this is not possible, I just try to avoid cars with Tesla’s reliability, Asian design and German software. (TBH, the national differences have pretty much diminished during the last decade.)

From Apple’s point of view it makes a lot of sense to choose a partner able to build reliable cars. Apple can take care of the design.

Also, there are not too many reputable car manufacturers with significant EV experience. PSA would be one, but it is not that global (Citroën, Opel, Vauxhall, Peugeot). VW is too busy trying not to stumble over it’s own feet with the MEB platform, Tesla is not a great cultural fit. So, there seem to be NissanRenault, GM and Hyundai plus a couple of Chinese manufacturers (BYD &al.) to choose from.

(And before anyone says the Chinese cannot make anything acceptable, have a look at Polestar 2.)

 

[Marco Klobas]

Fully autonomous Apple Car?

In that case, MacRumors, you have to find out another image for Apple Car topic.

 

[MacGekko]

If you ask me, self-driving capabilities are only part of the challenge - just regular electric vehicle technology needs improvement to become ubiquitous.

I really want to like electric cars, and I’m still hoping to own one eventually. But the reality is that, for current models, they cost too much, the range is too low, they take too long to charge, and if the battery wears out, it is literally cheaper to replace the car instead of just the battery.

I don’t mean this as a “hating on electric cars” post, but they just don’t seem ready to me.

Your information is off, the cost to replace the battery is way cheaper than a new car, some of the posts here speak to that famous Steve Jobs quote, also most EV cars bought new arrive with an 8 to 10 year battery warranty, check out some of the EV forums, you would be amazed at the life of these batteries in used and new purchases.

Reading some of these posts is surprising considering this is a tech site. I do agree that we are a few years away from cost parity between an EV and an ICE car, but you need to research charging times and think about the average miles you drive per day, does not make sense for everyone but most people drive less than 40 miles per day.

 

[MacGekko]

LOL. Apple is already fielding a fleet of autonomous cars every day and has been for several years now. Lots of miles under their belts.Got to get up on the news.

Exactly, I can't believe what I'm reading on here, and the assumption that if Apple does build a competing personal EV car, they will force you to be in self driving mode, it will be a choice, many ignorant posts, you would think people would do a modicum of research before spouting off.

Just visit Youtube and you'll see some dope sleeping in his Tesla. Somebody wrote about the human factor, the danger of a person in a traditional vehicle crashing into your self driving vehicle, in that situation a computer can react much faster than you can, greater chance you'll survive if you do have self driving enabled at the time or perhaps driver assistance will save you.

How many people die in an average year in car crashes, 30 to 50k, if most cars have driver assistance or self driving technology, what could you whittle that down to, perhaps less than 1k, that is progress.

 

[NotTooLate]

People not knowing how to drive is the wave of the future. Give it 20 years and 1/3 of the people that buy cars today will not be buying cars. If a robotaxi can get you there for the price of a latte, why bother owning a car and paying to insure, repair, and house it.

My car is a semi storage unit as well , bikes for kids , tents , poyka pot , beach stuff , cars are cheap now days (unless you insist on luxury cars , in that case you shouldn't care about money) , the reason to use such cars is the "don't drive and have fun during the ride" prospect , which I love , but I would like to own the car so it can have the things I need at an arms reach , but I guess the future is ownerless cars subscription , it what will make the most money for the companies , so they will gravitate there and make the lawmakers help them prevent me from owning a car , you can look at Tesla subscription models right now , its only going to get worse.

 

[NotTooLate]

Trust a company with my life?

You do it all the time , when you fly , when you drive , when you go to the hospital , you trust machinery and other humans all the time , there is no difference with another aspect of life where you trust someone else to do their job better then you could.

you are not in the hanger testing the airplane or in Boeing algorithm division (which had some issues lately) or do you fly/land the plane , today planes are on autopilot for 99% of the time , no one cares.

Or was this a /s that I missed? sorry if it was the case.

 

[Kierkegaarden]

This is the future, at least if you live in a city. This is where the bulk of ride sharing is anyways. Now there will be no more drivers to pay, no benefits, no unions. The cost to ride will be less, more private, cleaner, safer. No more car ownership. I’m all for it. Apple can pull this off.

 

[DrV]

That is probably why Tesla's model gets much of their forward data from the 4 cameras in the windshield where the wipers will keep the view clean. Also, why the side cameras point slight backward to keep them out of the splashing. They also heat their radar transceivers to ensure any ice melts off. Watch TeslaBjorn's youtube videos driving through Norway in slushy roads.

Tesla is partly self-driving on highways and main roads. I would love to see it negotiate narrow city streets where you cannot pass another car without finding a gap between parked cars or driving onto the pavement/sidewalk. Or parallel parking on such a street with considerable amount of snow/ice/slush.

I have not seen Bjørn drive in the narrow streets of Oslo with the Autopilot.

Or how about badly marked construction sites where even human drivers struggle to find the right route?

The point is that while Tesla’s Autopilot is truly a great achievement for a camera-based system, it is far, far away from level 5 (any time, anywhere, any conditions). It may be approaching level 4 at some point (some places in good conditions), but real driverless operation requires level 5. And that is more likely decades than years away.

There are two important things to be kept in mind:

1. At level 3 and above the car manufacturer is responsible for whatever happens in traffic.

2. Current state of the art: level 3, certain highways, under 60 km/h (37 mph), over +4°C/39°F, no significant precipitation.

 

[Mac Fly (film)]

You can’t produce a car without hardware. Remember the story Apple wasn’t working on hardware? Guys, both these stories are fake leaks. Buys them some time. Apple car will have a steering wheel and will come after the consumer market. Make no mistake. Full autonomy is twenty years away. Head-fake, people.

 

[tillathenun]

It makes no sense to me. Apple make their money selling expensive products to the general public. Most people don't want cars they can't drive themselves — where's the fun in that?

 

[tillathenun]

Not EVs.

EVs from Kia are far more reliable than those from Tesla.

 

[gnasher729]

So it may not even be a car you can buy, rather a car that is integrated into some sort of Uber-like thing*. I am ok with that to be honest.

*Since it says sold to agencies, it may just be sold to Uber and Lyft as is, since they kind of already have that marketshare.

If this was working well enough to sell to Uber or Lyft, why would Apple do that? Why hand free money to these companies?

 

[peneaux]

If the car is to be completely driverless (SAE autonomy level 5), it won’t be released in 2024. I doubt it will be released in 2034, either.

Alternatively, it may be aimed at very limited markets; the cars only operate in a restricted area in good weather. But does that make any commercial sense?

Most people have no idea what SAE autonomy level 5 is. They will hype like there's no tomorrow. Apple will pump their stock, "journalists" will write ADrticles and clueless will praise Apple even more.

And of course you have the dreamers. -In 5 years all cars will be electric and drive by itself. LOL

 

[Smartass]

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[Smartass]

Apple Car wont start unless youre wearing 4 masks or however many Fauci and Bill Gates deem necessary at the time

And it wont start until "Anti systemic racism treshold in number of passengers" is acchieved.

Who the heck wants a car that drives itself, I sure as hell do not. How BORING.

People who dont know/can't learn how to drive. This is actually a brilliant idea, it will mean that all the incompetent people wont be driving no more, which means less stress for people that actually like to drive a car.