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I'm also not sure that I believe that there is a transferable organizational expertise between integrating hardware and software on mobile phones and integratin

I'm also not sure that I believe that there is a transferable organizational expertise between integrating hardware and software on mobile phones and integrating hardware and software on self-driving cars. Seriously, what does that look like? What are the attributes of a person who is good at integrating hardware and software on a phone, and who also is good at integrating hardware and software on a self-driving car? Your example was jerkiness in acceleration and deceleration. The people who are good at mitigating jerkiness in acceleration and deceleration are presumably mechanical engineers and roboticists/AI guys. I don't think that any of those people have been involved in Apple's flagship, reputation-making products so far. As you allude to, it's easy to say "do the same thing but better." If all you needed was a product guy who was like, "Hey, we should make this better," then it would already be solved.

Retric 10y ago
I don't think the low level technical expertise is going to transfer, but their higher level management experience of integrating hardware, software, and manufacturing can probably transfer. The best example I can give is stuttering when you drag stuff around. Android phones had issues for years with this because it's not really a hardware or software issue it's both. Eventually you can throw enough processing power to make this go away, but being a few years ahead of that curve is the kind of thing people will pay a premium for. Ed: It's the kind of issue you can't just point at one group and say fix this. PS: That said, I don't think an iCar is a good idea right now. We seem to be in the Palm pilot stage of self driving cars, give it 15 years and apple could make a killing, but it's still a little early.