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Apple receives permit in California to test self-driving cars
- jakelarkin 10y agobeen seeing Apple Maps marked vans with Lidar units in SF and East Bay for months. Presumably theyre done building the base map.
- zyang 10y agocomment from someone that works in maps.
- randomsofr 10y agoAutoplay video, closes tab.
- geodel 10y agoThanks for letting us know that you closed the tab.
- Veratyr 10y agoIf you use uMatrix, no video plays by default, as it's hosted on another domain.
- jermspeaks 10y agoWhew, averted
- pryelluw 10y agoInteresting how many toyota vehicles are used as development mules
- shouldbworking 10y agoDoes anyone care that regulatory realities will prevent driverless cars from ever carrying human passengers? Planes and trains have been driving themselves for many years but they still have human pilots. The human need for somebody to blame is stronger than market forces trying to eliminate human drivers
- BillinghamJ 10y agoDo you have anything meaningful to back up your point? Any sources? Anyone else who agrees?
- andai 10y agoI agree!
- mrbabbage 10y agoOn the train point, humans have operated fully automatic rail systems for nearly fifty years (the London Underground Victoria Line opened in 1968; BART in San Francisco is similarly automated and open in 1972). The first unattended train to my knowledge, the Vancouver SkyTrain, didn't open til 1985, or 17 years later. My interpretation: it took a while—17 years—for people to warm up to driverless trains on fixed routes with no at-grade intersections.
- jacquesm 10y agoAlso in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m12tb1p_NEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m12tb1p_NEM
- adolph 10y agoAlso Dallas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DFW_Skylink https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DFW_Skylink
- linkregister 10y agoWho is the person who sits at the front of the BART train? That isn't the operator?
- pvg 10y agoIt is. What they spend most of their time operating are the doors, though.
- salimmadjd 10y agoOf all the SV tech giants (obviously Tesla excluded), Apple has the best DNA to build cars. They know how manufacture in scale. They know how build a vertical product. They have the cash to do it and they have a strong brand. But most importantly, if the world moves to a car-sharing car-hailing model of autonomous cars. Ultimately, it becomes a consumer mobile play. This is where both Google and Apple own that experience. Siri will know where you are and when you need a car. This is something both Lyft and Uber wont be able to compete with.
- dcwca 10y ago> Apple has the best DNA to build cars. They know how to manufacture in scale. Something tells me shipping your phones off to be built by other people in China and building your own auto assembly factories from scratch are two completely separate things.
- vernie 10y agoMaybe Foxconn has automotive ambitions.
- salimmadjd 10y agoTake the precision by which apple makes watches, laptops or iPhones. They can scale the size up and with the same precision margins you'll get the car parts. You get BMW or someone else to source you the electric motor. And you just need to manufacture the body the interior part and put in your software. Obviously it's a lot more complex than this. But Apple could easily hire 10-20 people from car industry to fill the missing gap and get there in 5-6 years.
- __jal 10y agoUh. My hobby is metal machining. Precision is a matter of understanding the physics of what you're doing, knowing your machines, and, well, the machines. I can give you close to 0.0001 tolerances with the machine in my apartment (about 6-7 times better than stock cheap mills that haven't been properly tuned, depending on the material). Use a big, rigid, production-oriented machining center built for it, and you can do better. I can't build you a car, though. Precision has nothing to do with this. > But Apple could easily hire 10-20 people from car industry to fill the missing gap and get there in 5-6 years. Something tells me you haven't been part of a project that involved mass production, complex engineering (not software-engineering; engineering), or regulatory compliance. If I were to guess, I'd say Apple has already hired at least 10-20 automotive industry lawyers, just to get moving on just the regulatory side of it.
- notliketherest 10y agoIs it just me, or have folks living in the bay area noticed a huge increase in the number of "self driving" cars driving around? I've even seen a minivan with what looked to be a hastly assembled lidar driving around Sunnyvale. The space seems to be really heating up.
- throwaway91111 10y ago...in the heart of silicon valley.
- username223 10y agoIt's tempting to strap random hardware to your roof to make other drivers fear you and give you more space.
- andai 10y agohahahaha
- andai 10y agoSince I can no longer delete this, I'll just say, I genuinely thought it was a joke! Is there a way to express appreciation of humor on HN without getting down voted? (Obviously 'lol' / 'haha' are looked down upon here)
- username223 10y agoFor what it's worth, it was intended as a joke, and I didn't vote on your comment either way. If I appreciate someone else's joke here, I'll usually just upvote it. PS -- If anyone actually does this, e.g. by strapping an old SGI Indy and its 90s webcam to their ride, please post photos here!
- dilap 10y agoi see them all the time skating, and they are already far less scary than normal drivers :)
- chrismealy 10y agoApple decided making wifi hardware was too hard, but they can make cars?
- icanhackit 10y agoMy guess: they saw a flooded market with no brand loyalty because its a box that sits unnoticed in an office or living room and said "We can leave the scraps for Linksys and TP-Link" then saw Tesla's margins and said "Yeah, that looks nice."
- elmar 10y agoTesla burns cash, loses more than $4,000 on every car sold http://www.reuters.com/article/us-teslamotors-cash-insight-idUSKCN0QE0DC20150810 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-teslamotors-cash-insight-i...
- icanhackit 10y ago1.) That article is from 2015. 2.) Dividing operating losses by number of cars sold is...not a very good way of calculating things. You're taking R&D, new capital (Gigafactories, retail outlets, acquisitions like SolarCity) and all other expenses and dividing by number of cars sold. It makes for a nice clean Excel spreadsheet (A1 divided by A2) but a poor understanding of how emerging businesses with huge growth potential work under the hood.
- elmar 10y agoWhy Investors Love Elon Musk, Even Though Tesla Is Losing Money (2017) https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardhyu/2017/02/24/why-investors-love-elon-musk-even-though-tesla-is-losing-money/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardhyu/2017/02/24/why-invest...
- icanhackit 10y agoIt's a more recent article but doesn't invalidate the primary point: the cars aren't losing money, vast capital investment results in losses. The stock price remains high despite this because significant investments implies significant future growth and innovation.
- jcfrei 10y agoI doubt Apple will ever launch its own car. However it seems that quite a few large IT firms consider DaaS (Driving as a Service) a viable B2B market. If you can create a superior suite of machine learning tools (including always up-to-date road data) that successfully drives passengers and goods from point A to point B then you can secure big revenue streams from automobile companies for years to come.
- dbcurtis 10y agoI agree. Take a quick look at the value chain, and think about who is going to capture the bulk of the margin. Is it the company building thousands of pounds of commodity pig iron? Or is it the company providing the machine learning secret sauce? Or is it the company making must-have sensors. My bet is on the software and the sensors. PC's of a couple of decades ago provide a parallel. Microsoft getting 10's of dollars of margin off every PC, Intel getting 10's or maybe 100+ dollars of margin off every PC, and motherboard makers with a gross margin of $3 per board. Much less the case makers.... The old line auto manufactures are building cases for the computers and software that are tomorrow's self-driving cars.
- CharlesW 10y ago> I doubt Apple will ever launch its own car. It's a large consumer market that's changing rapidly and ripe for disruption. Why would you doubt that Apple will enter it?
- jcfrei 10y agoBecause manufacturing your own car in large quantities is very difficult. Tesla is a good example on how difficult it is to scale up production numbers. And even though the market / products themselves are changing rapidly the required expertise for a mass production of cars remains the same. I think an acquisition would be slightly more realistic. But has Apple ever acquired an entire product line? I don't think that's in their DNA (EDIT: Beats being one notable and recent exception...).
- adamlett 10y ago
- 11thEarlOfMar 10y agoIn some markets, it is more about getting it right than getting in at the right time. We've seen many carcasses of products that were ahead of their time, not because they were bad ideas but because they were not formulated for mass adoption. Apple's own Newton is one example. It took the iPhone formulation to make the product features successful in the market. A more recent example is the telepresence robot. Many entries, but still more Newton than iPhone. With Apple, it's easy to pick out their winners and losers: iPhone, iMac, MacBook, ... vs, Apple TV, Lisa, Newton, .... At their current scale, Apple needs to enter really big markets in order to move the needle on sales and profits. There aren't many really big tech markets left. Cars are an interesting play in that it combines robotics and consumer tech, and puts them into a market that has room for multiple large players and plenty of opportunity for disruption. The transition to an electric drive train and autonomous navigation presents an entry point. There will be multiple winners.
- asimpletune 10y ago> There aren't many really big tech markets left Global GDB is estimated to be at around 80 trillion $.
- abritinthebay 10y agoAppleTV a loser? The only device significantly ahead of it in sales is the Roku (Amazon and Google's sticks are ~the same number of sales as Apple TV). But the market is pretty evenly split in sales and Apple still maintains one of the larger overall install bases for any of them (not the outsized winner it used to be there though of course). "Not being a de-facto monopoly" is hardly a loss.
- datguacdoh 10y agoArticles like http://www.recode.net/platform/amp/2016/6/10/11904942/google-chromecast-apple-tv-sales http://www.recode.net/platform/amp/2016/6/10/11904942/google... seem to point to Apple TV being easily outsold by Amazon and Google.
- 10y ago
- israrkhan 10y agoself-driving cars are becoming a crowded space. Too many players, with no clear winner in sight. The real problem to solve here is not technical , its regulatory. Tesla and Google have some advantage, but it is still far from reality.
- chrismealy 10y agoThe main problem is totally technical! Robot cars can barely deal with following white lines on the road. How about rain, construction, poorly marked roads, fallen trees, badly parked delivery trucks, emergency vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, etc? Can cars read roads signs and understand them? We'll have full-on AI before self-driving cars are for real.
- legolas2412 10y agoI've been parroting this on every self driving thread. I finally found one person who agrees with my thinking that driving is as hard as general AI. Why is this idea so opposed by everyone?
- chrismealy 10y agoAt least we have each other. Honestly, I am completely baffled that people who write software think self-driving cars are just around the corner. At this point I think it's basically a futurist cult.
- throwaway144265 10y agoThere are some of us lurkers who agree with you wholeheartedly. This the general consensus in the academy too.
- marze 10y ago99% of situations are the "easy" part. It is the last 1% that will take a long time. Snow. Rain. Missing headlight. Etc.
- ziikutv 10y agoHeres a question, I know a lot of companies are investing their time/money into working on self-driving cars.. but from what I see, a lot of the cars use the same sensor. LIDAR and cameras being the main sensors. Of course, we have already seen Tesla perform well with these sensors. However, my question: Is/Was this industry only held back by sensing? edit: Restructure paragraph Regards,
- tyingq 10y agoThe real asset is likely all the collected data from the sensors, and not the sensors themselves. The early players have a substantial head start. Their AI software basically has a huge private training corpus that makes it perform better. Tesla would suffer a bit since their data is less rich without lidar, but make up for some of that with the larger aggregate miles traveled. Not to say some players don't have better lidar than others, but the sensor quality/price should even out over time since credible third parties are in the business of selling it.
- marvin 10y agoAlso, Tesla probably has a plan B for duct-taping LIDAR sensors onto their production cars in case the whole camera + radar + ultrasound approach doesn't work out (or if LIDARs come down in price and turn out to make the system more reliable). With a massive vehicle base and global network of service centers, there should be a possibility there.
- jacquesm 10y agoIt's a combination of elements: sensor price, progress in ML, available computational power on board of the vehicle, the advent of electric vehicles, lots of available data and the ability to process all that data, the fact that it is a huge market waiting to be unlocked. All those together account for a good chunk of the reasons why right now there are at least 10 and probably more parties active (parties that have a credible shot at achieving this).
- tamal 10y agoTesla does not use LIDAR, they use radar.
- gajeam 10y agoI guess you never know with Apple but it just seems like a really crowded space for them to come into, especially if they insist on controlling the whole ecosystem like they do with their other products. First of all, it's a high price tag for them to get top talent in the area. Waymo, Uber, Tesla, Ford (and a dozen other car companies), and who knows how many start ups are all vying for the same pool of engineers. Even if they get top talent, it's another story holding onto it. If you look at the LinkedIns (Anthony Levandowski, Jur van den Berg, Chris Thrun, all the founders of Otto and Argo AI), they change jobs every two years. Their success I feel depends on how much control they are willing to give up in partnerships and how good they are at choosing winners in the race to autonomous vehicles. They already have $1B invested in Didi last year--it will be interesting to see where they go from here.
- CharlesW 10y ago> I guess you never know with Apple but it just seems like a really crowded space for them to come into… The iPhone entered a crowded phone market and now controls the vast majority of smartphone profits. There's really no such thing as market "saturation" when you can grow the market and eat old participants. > First of all, it's a high price tag for them to get top talent in the area. Apple has $250 billion in cash, so this doesn't strike me as a huge concern. > Their success I feel depends on how much control they are willing to give up in partnerships… As with phones, their hypothetical success in this area will be due to how much they won't give up. Apple learned this lesson with the disastrous Motorola ROKR E1, a.k.a. the one where they tried to be a "good industry partner" and play by industry rules. If Apple enters this market, they'll play by Apple's rules and give up virtually nothing. Any launch partner(s) will profit, but on Apple's terms.
- bigtimeidiot 10y ago>Apple has $250 billion in cash, so this doesn't strike me as a huge concern. It's not their money, it's the shareholders. It might be tough to make a case to them to jump into this market.
- MarkMc 10y ago
- mvpu 10y agoWow. Amazon is probably working on it too. Great that 10 years from now we'll be seeing Teslas, Apples, Googles and Amazons on the road more than Fords, Chevys, Hondas and Nissans. Interesting times.
- ams6110 10y agoYou think Ford, Chevy, Honda and Nissan are not working on self-driving technology?
- rifung 10y agoI'm not sure that's actually the case. It's still up in the air whether Apple, Google, and Amazon are actually going to be building the cars or just building software/hardware that auto manufacturers can add to their cars. I suspect, at least in the beginning, they will just be building autonomous technology and letting the auto manufacturers add it to their cars.
- jes5199 10y agoTesla has such a head start on car production, I don't see how Apple can catch up.
- adamlett 10y agoAre you kidding me? Tesla? Tesla owns one factory, which they bought used from Toyota. They have yet to demonstrate the ability to manufacture at anything approaching the scale of other, more affordable car brands. Catching up to Tesla's ability to produce cars will not be the problem if Apple decides to enter that market.
- tim333 10y agoPeople used to say Nokia had such a head start on phone production, how could Apple catch up.
- mikerathbun 10y agoSo far all the articles I have seen are about Apple experimenting with autonomous technology and most people assume that they are also building an electric vehicle. Those are two very different and challenging projects. I have been an Apple user since 2000 and a Tesla driver for four months and I don't see the current Apple being able to pull off an entire new car platform like that. This isn't a "one more thing" kind of reveal. Look at how long it took Tesla to get to the point where they can mass produce a relatively inexpensive electric vehicle with a basic self driving platform. I am a huge fan of both companies and have stained teeth from all of the Kool Aid, but just getting the battery manufacturing in place seems like an impossible feat for a company that is going to take over two years to design and release a new modular desktop computer for content creators.
- Animats 10y agoThose are two very different and challenging projects. Exactly. Some self-driving projects have used electric or hybrid cars because they usually have electric power steering, which is easy to control by computer. But the technologies are unrelated.
- nyxtom 10y agoSee, it's not that hard Uber
- free23a 10y agoFirst,who dies Uber think it is circumventing the medallion sytem that taxi companies must abide by. Second, who does Apple or Google think they are by imposing dangerous obstacles on us on our roadways.
- uptown 10y agoI'm guessing if and when Apple enters the market, they won't be selling cars. They'll be selling the service of transportation.
- btgeekboy 10y agoI agree that it won't be cars. But I wouldn't be surprised if they sold the onboard entertainment and autopilot systems.
- manmal 10y agoIdk, services have never been their primary product. It was always a hardware product, and all the software and services around it were enablers of that hardware. Sure, they could change and start a service product, but it just feels awkward.
- drawkbox 10y agoUber and Google/Waymo do it in Phoenix quite a bit. The roads are perfect for first iteration/testing, mostly 1 mile squares and less intense. I see many Waymo and Ubers on the road here.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThis is pretty exciting but it is also the worst kept secret in the Bay Area :-) I suppose they could have surprised us and filed for a rocket launch license. I'm not sure what Apple expects to bring to this party but I know if you're getting a masters or PhD right now make sure your thesis topic is machine learning autonomous action in health/life/safety situations :-). I expect you will be recruited heavily.
- skdotdan 10y agoApple is good at UX and design. A L5 Self-driving car implies no UX at all, and most people won't care of the design if Self-driving cabs become a commodity. Apple is not about logistics. So, Apple's opportunity will be L2-L3.
- falcolas 10y agoDear Car Companies: If you would really like to advance the state of the art for self driving technology, I invite you come up to the mid-west, especially in the winter months, and make your toys work under those conditions. Working up here will push your technology quite far, with snow, slush, worn away lane markers, cold temperatures, wind, potholes, washboard roads, ice, clogged sensors, blocked GPS, and any number of the above challenges thrown together in random and unpredictable patterns. If you can get to level 4 or 5 automation in those conditions, making them work in the eternally sunny portions of CA will be a snap. Sincerely, a Montanan (who is annoyed they had to deal with snow, ice, blocked sensors, and cold temperatures just this morning)
- Waterluvian 10y agoYes! Come to Canada and try out your tech. California is so soft.
- rsync 10y agoGod it is so true. There's such an amazing cultural comparison to be made between I-70 over Vail pass (in Colorado) and I-80 over Donner pass in California. Vail pass rarely closes and is open for vehicle traffic in blizzard-like conditions - but you're on your own. You'd better be well prepared and be the competent driver of a well-maintained, capable 4WD vehicle. And so, in a blizzard, Vail pass will be nearly empty and the occasional driver will be well-equipped for the trip. In California, they enforce chain control on I-80 for all vehicles. This has the (amazing, stupefying) perverse outcome of allowing everyone to drive over Donner pass in a blizzard. Further, they are emboldened by the chains to drive quite poorly in conditions they have no idea of how to drive in. The result is, during a full-blown blizzard, I was driving next to some moron in a RWD camaro trying to bob and weave through slower moving traffic. Dense traffic. Dense traffic largely made of other rear wheel drive cars operated by drivers with no snow driving experience. California.
- dmix 10y agoThis comment gets made in every single self driving car thread. These companies are full of the smartest engineers in the world. They know conditions are different outside of California. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't be focused on California right now.
- briandear 10y agoThis thread is going to be golden in 10 years: a time capsule of cynicism.