Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Kuo: Apple Car Team Must Be Reorganized Soon to Meet 2025 Production Goal

jole said:
If "works" is defined as car fully drives by itself (like in the name), FSD beta does not work anywhere. It has a bold vision of someday doing that.

If "works" is defined as you can take your hands of the wheel for 30 seconds and will probably not die, FSD beta works. Also 1970 Toyota Corolla passes the same definition.



This is news to me. Reference, please.
Click to expand...
Injury in Waymo crash.
www.wired.com

Waymo's Self-Driving Car Crash in Arizona Revives Tough Questions

Whether or not the autonomous Pacifica minivan was at fault, it's bad news for a young industry trying to prove it can makes roads safer for everyone.
www.wired.com www.wired.com

In 2018, a pedestrian was killed by an Uber self-driving car.

Tesla FSD does drive by itself. Does it do it well? Sometimes very well. Sometimes not well at all. But it does work and improves every few weeks.
 
erthquake said:
Cruise and Waymo only work in a few locations where they've collected hyper-HD maps. It's not a scalable solution because collecting and QC'ing that map data is expensive, time-consuming, and fragile as the cars are much less likely to be able to adapt to changing street conditions like construction zones. So while you may be technically correct in saying Waymo is ahead of Tesla in Phoenix, it's not true anywhere else.
Click to expand...

Both Cruise and Waymo operate just fine without a HD map. It is just one added input to AI. Same as Lidar. Their approach is to gather as many inputs as they can - and then decide based on that.

Quick proof: Reality changes way more frequently than HD maps in any location. Still the cars are able to drive with that renewed reality. Then HD map is available, it is used as an input. When not, then the car drives without the HD map.

Also, you may have noted that both Cruise and Waymo operate in San Francisco. If you have ever tried to drive there, it is a quite challenging driving environment.

erthquake said:
Moreover, Cruise and Waymo are not able to collect enough miles of data to experience edge cases because they have orders of magnitude fewer cars on the road than Tesla.
Click to expand...

Tesla cars do not send all miles driven back to HQ for training. Nor do they train NNs in car.

Instead, cars (for which drivers so allow) can send short video snippets and photos of specific subjects Tesla team need to train NNs on. While this is way more limited than what you propose above, it is hugely beneficial. Say, Tesla would like to train NN on railroad crossings of Canada. They just request 1000 samples of such railroad crossings across the whole country and will probably get those overnight. Waymo would need to send a car to Canada for collecting the data.

erthquake said:
Then you have to consider who has or will have more compute available to train the neural nets that control driving policy. Waymo? Maybe, depending on how much resources Google decides to dedicate to the problem. Cruise? Certainly not. Tesla when Dojo comes online late this year? Almost certainly.
Click to expand...

I really would not bet against Google (or Microsoft or Amazon) on availability of compute. Dojo is a super impressive computer, but Google's scale is something else being one of the top 3 cloud operators in the world and arguably top 1 company in AI.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: 6787872
erthquake said:
Injury in Waymo crash.
www.wired.com

Waymo's Self-Driving Car Crash in Arizona Revives Tough Questions

Whether or not the autonomous Pacifica minivan was at fault, it's bad news for a young industry trying to prove it can makes roads safer for everyone.
www.wired.com www.wired.com

In 2018, a pedestrian was killed by an Uber self-driving car.

Tesla FSD does drive by itself. Does it do it well? Sometimes very well. Sometimes not well at all. But it does work and improves every few weeks.
Click to expand...

You said: "Tesla FSD beta works anywhere in the US, hasn't killed or injured anyone like Waymo has. FSD Beta errs on the side of safety vs smooth performance."

You know, Waymo and Uber are two different companies.

Only injury quoted in the article you shared was: "According to a police statement released Saturday, a Honda sedan traveling eastbound entered an intersection on a red light and swerved to avoid another vehicle traveling north, veering into the Waymo Chrysler Pacifica’s westbound lane. The Honda hit the Waymo vehicle on its side, injuring the the SUV's female safety driver.". Someone else driving through red and crashing to side of a Waymo car cannot really be characterized as "Waymo injuring anyone".

Completely refuting the point you tried to make, the article you linked summarizes the situation:
"Waymo announced its cars have driven 5 million miles on public roads since its beginnings as the Google Self Driving program in 2009. Crash reports (which companies developing autonomous tech must make public in California) show Waymo cars have been involved in upward of 30 minor crashes but have caused just one: In 2016, a Lexus SUV in autonomous mode changed lanes into the path of a public bus. The SUV sustained minor damage, and no one was hurt."
 
  • Like
Reactions: 6787872
AgeOfSpiracles said:
This notion that car makers are some sort of artisan craftsmen who guard ancient secrets is hilarious. You don't have to be Adrian Newey to make a Jetta. For all their faults, Tesla proves that if you hire good engineers and nail the marketing, you can conjure a brand new automaker from nothing and succeed.
Click to expand...
Tesla succeeded because there was a huge unfilled market for electric cars, and a visionary came along to fill it. The iPhone succeeded because another visionary, Steve Jobs, saw a huge unfilled market that no one else had seen, and filled it. What on earth is the unfilled market the Apple car supposed to be filling, and who on earth is the great visionary that is seeing it? Tim Cook? Don't make me laugh.

Sure, products like the AirPods succeeded, even though the market for wireless earphones was already reasonably mature, because they: leveraged off the Apple brand; they are a product that goes hand in hand with Apple's core products of iPhones, iPads, and Macs; and Apple removed the jack to push everyone onto them.

However, Apple making cars makes as much sense as them getting into high rise apartment construction. There is absolutely no leverage except, what, CarPlay? Siri? There's no visionary leading the project, and no one knows what the hell they are going to create that has "yet another disruptive Apple product" written all over it. No one wants to release an Apple car that's a flop, it has to be Wow. Thus, presumably, all the delays.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️
sideshowuniqueuser said:
What on earth is the unfilled market the Apple car supposed to be filling, and who on earth is the great visionary that is seeing it?
Click to expand...

Apple Chauffeur. Car becomes your personal office space, where the door opens to different destinations. Think:
  • Turning commute to work-time: meetings, email, coding, ...
  • Turning family trips to time together, around a table, facing each other, even the driver participating
  • Lunch on the way to your destination
  • Self-driving kind to/from school
  • Overnight 500mi ride while sleeping, waking up in the destination 7am
  • Relaxing with a book/movie/... on a longer rides. Think train vs car.
  • Go to a bar/dinner and have a couple of drink more
There are 0 competing products out for that market today. First one to to pull this off can set their price.
 
  • Like
  • Love
Reactions: Minxy and SFjohn
jole said:
Apple Chauffeur. Car becomes your personal office space, where the door opens to different destinations. Think:
  • Turning commute to work-time: meetings, email, coding, ...
  • Turning family trips to time together, around a table, facing each other, even the driver participating
  • Lunch on the way to your destination
  • Self-driving kind to/from school
  • Overnight 500mi ride while sleeping, waking up in the destination 7am
  • Relaxing with a book/movie/... on a longer rides. Think train vs car.
  • Go to a bar/dinner and have a couple of drink more
There are 0 competing products out for that market today. First one to to pull this off can set their price.
Click to expand...
Taking a nap or sleeping through a trip, awesome!
 
  • Like
Reactions: TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️
Looks like Ming Chi Kuo is really bent on acquiring more twitter followers, as evidenced by his incessant tweeting of unsubstantiated rumours that have increasingly proven to be inaccurate.
 
Kuo says Apple has a 2025 production goal, is this the first realistic date that’s been mooted?
 
frostbit3 said:
Yes, they spent 10x more. They also had over 3x revenue. They've built their entire platform to run on their own in-house SoC that is competing and beating x86 on some levels.

To say "slightly better/faster iphones with slightly improved cameras" is pretty oversimplification.
Click to expand...
That in-house SoC (PA Semi) was bought by Steve Jobs for 1/4 the price Tim paid for Beats. And the bulk of their extremely modest revenue growth in the last 10 years was driven by innovations that were announced before Tim Cook became CEO.

And considering iPhone represents 50% of sales, it’s not much of an oversimplification.
 
erthquake said:
Waymo only works in a few locations. Tesla FSD beta works anywhere in the US, hasn't killed or injured anyone like Waymo has. FSD Beta errs on the side of safety vs smooth performance.
Click to expand...

It works better in those cities than FSD does in its entirety.

Shall we compare fatalities with autopilot or you just gonna move goalposts again?

Try again.
 
I feel like Kevin whiffed on the first version of the Apple Watch. I wonder if he’ll do the same on the car, or turn out to be the one that “saves” it. I imagine that would come in from his experience with the watch and realizing it doesn't need to be all things to all people, and really embracing slow updates cycles.
 
jole said:
Apple Chauffeur. Car becomes your personal office space, where the door opens to different destinations. Think:
  • Turning commute to work-time: meetings, email, coding, ...
  • Turning family trips to time together, around a table, facing each other, even the driver participating
  • Lunch on the way to your destination
  • Self-driving kind to/from school
  • Overnight 500mi ride while sleeping, waking up in the destination 7am
  • Relaxing with a book/movie/... on a longer rides. Think train vs car.
  • Go to a bar/dinner and have a couple of drink more
There are 0 competing products out for that market today. First one to to pull this off can set their price.
Click to expand...
Which every single electric car maker will release as soon as genuine FSD comes along. Starting w Tesla. Sometime around 3025.

And just in case you have doubts. Let me remind you of the pure AI genius of Siri.

So, um, what's this unfilled market the Apple car supposed to be filling?
 
  • Like
Reactions: TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back