5 ms·

Behind Apple's Doomed Car Project: False Starts and Wrong Turns

25 points by ripe 3y ago

oldgradstudent 3y ago
> Mr. Ive and his team of designers drew concepts for a car that would look like a European minivan such as the Fiat Multipla 600, which has a half-dozen windows and a curving roof. It had no steering wheel and would be controlled using Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri. > One day, in the fall of 2015, Mr. Ive and Mr. Cook met at the project’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., for a demonstration of how the car might work. The two men sank into the seats of a cabinlike interior. Outside, a voice actor read from a script of what Siri would say as the men zoomed down the road in the imaginary car. Mr. Ive asked Siri what restaurant they passed and the actor read an answer, said two people familiar with the demonstration. Tackling one of the hardest technical problems ever attempted, where it was not clear at all whether a solution is even possible (it is still not clear) they seriously discussed the script Siri would read.
- ripe 3y ago
  I was going to say exactly the same thing. This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes. When you're dealing with very hard engineering problems, you really don't yet know enough to be designing a product. I think it's very interesting that Apple went back and forth on the purpose of the project: were they building an electric car that people could use? Or a self-driving dream car? This is a critical question. Depending on which one you want to build, the process has to be completely different, no? My outsider impression: most Apple groups excel as "productizers" of technology that has already been developed, but perhaps not as developers of technology themselves. I guess the chip making shop that produced the M1 and M2 would not be this type of group.
  - culturestate 3y ago
    > This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes. When you're dealing with very hard engineering problems, you really don't yet know enough to be designing a product. I suppose we can get into the weeds on how you define "designing a product," but under the right circumstances targeting a specific experience and working backwards to the technology has pretty clear benefits. Ignoring Apple - because this kind of over-the-top process is just how they're wired - look at something like a modern automatic defibrillator. Literally any human being can use one with zero training because the goal was "make a defibrillator that someone can operate with one button" from the beginning. If your goal is instead e.g. "make this existing defibrillator easier to use," you might still end up with a really good product but you probably don't have something that my mom could reasonably be expected to deploy if she runs across someone having a heart attack on the street.
  - GenerWork 3y ago
    >This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes As opposed to engineer-led processes, which as we all know are infallible and always produce products that go to market 100% of the time :) >I think it's very interesting that Apple went back and forth on the purpose of the project This is the real reason it failed. The fact that nobody at Apple could say "this is what we're aiming to do" and then stick to that vision is more telling about Apple culture than it is about any UX processes.
  - simonh 3y ago
    It depends where you draw the line in the tech stack. On the hardware side they've always worked at least at the same hardware level as any workstation or PC vendor, and often arguably lower than that working with component manufacturers to custom spec particular components. They're an aggressive early adopter of new tech, putting in the work to adapt it to their product categories, sometimes directly funding tech development with partners to make that happen. They jumped on the tech for laser cutting aluminium laptop and mobile device bodies from aluminium blocks, gorilla glass for mobile devices, helped develop the specs and tech for retina and 5K displays, were actively involved in the development of open technologies like Wifi, USB, Firewire, etc. They've never been content to just buy parts off the shelf, pushing to promote the development of and get early access to new stuff other competitors didn't have. On the software side they hired the best, including about half the former staff of Xerox PARC, the developer of the MACH microkernel, the developer of LLVM. You could argue that Apple didn't invent these technologies, but people at Apple did.
  - oldgradstudent 3y ago
    > I was going to say exactly the same thing. This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes. When you're dealing with very hard engineering problems, you really don't yet know enough to be designing a product. It's like the Wright brothers, before working on the Kitty Hawk, worked on mocks up of an online ticket ordering system.
- itslennysfault 3y ago
  Siri can't even get basic tasks right, and they want me to trust it to drive my car? ....nah.
- cube00 3y ago
  Bike-shedding at its finest.
- kemayo 3y ago
  That actually seems like a reasonable thing to do. Early-on going "assuming that we solve the technical issues with self-driving, can we make this into a product that works for us?" makes sense to me. After all, if they found that they couldn't come up with a good experience for it, then they could stop throwing all that effort into solving the hard technical problems.
decafninja 3y ago
While I want autonomous cars to become available if for no other reason than to allow my elderly parents to continue using a car, I have serious doubts that it’s going to come about during their lifetime. Having said that, I’m fully prepared to become their chauffeur at some point in the future. I’ve started looking at bigger vehicles I previously would not have been interested in so that I can drive them around in comfort and luxury. Also curious about what are the Chinese EV manufacturers doing in this space? Are they putting much effort into autonomous driving, are they mainly focused on just making a plain old good electric car?
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  Chinese OEMs are putting a moderate amount of work into the space at L2-L3, as those offerings are rapidly becoming mandatory features for flagship product lines. There are Chinese teams working on L4, but it's difficult to get an good sense of their maturity right now.
  - decafninja 3y ago
    I could be wrong, but seems only American and European (or just the Germans?) are aggressively pursuing L4+ while Asia (China/Japan/Korea) is focusing more on L2/3 for now?
    - AlotOfReading 3y ago
      No, there are a large number of Chinese companies that have active L4 efforts. Xpeng, Baidu, weride, pony.ai, etc. They tend to also have partial autonomy (L2-L3) efforts because that's what the Chinese OEMs want to invest in.
  - neom 3y ago
    Best read I can usually get is from wheelsboy https://www.youtube.com/@Wheelsboy/videos https://www.youtube.com/@Wheelsboy/videos Some of the stuff he test drives is pretty wild to me, very curious how the next 5-10 years are going to look.
ViktorRay 3y ago
People keep talking about artificial “intelligence”. Please tell me. How “inteligent” are our AI if they can’t manage to drive a car? A task that any 18 year old human with some training can do?
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  "AI" doesn't necessarily imply general AI. Besides, it's well known that many of the things we find easy as humans are extremely difficult for computers and vice versa. That observation even has a name: moravec's paradox.
- browningstreet 3y ago
  That’s what everyone is trying to develop. It’s early days for AI/ML/whateveryoucallit. We’re not at the 3D TV stage of things, where the tech works but no one wants it. More interesting to me is that Apple is making noises about going all in on AI/ML but they decided it wouldn’t help their car efforts. And by car I mean self-driving.
- dartos 3y ago
  We’ll I don’t think any multimodal model has been trained for 18 continuous years, so we’re not sure yet. Also the word “intelligence” isn’t well defined. Also the word term AI is just marketing. It’s all statistics
- two_handfuls 3y ago
  Not very intelligent. Yet. Why do you ask?
- randomdata 3y ago
  AI is not intelligent. That is why we call it AI and not I.
- itslennysfault 3y ago
  With no training, actually. Anyone can "figure out" how to drive a car. Me and a friend started stealing his mom's car and joy riding at night at 13. No one taught us how to drive. Thankfully, shockingly, no one got hurt and we never got caught.
sfjailbird 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240229094431/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/technology/behind-the-apple-car-dead.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240229094431/https://www.nytim...
kemayo 3y ago
> Apple’s dead car project will be survived by its underlying technologies. The company plans to take what it has learned about artificial intelligence and automation and apply it to other technologies that are being researched, including A.I.-powered AirPods with cameras, robot assistants and augmented reality, according to three people briefed on the projects. It's difficult to get a sense for what actually came out of the car project while it was running. But you can certainly imagine a case where a $1b/year R&D project, at Apple's scale, was giving them acceptable returns to feed into their other products. e.g. a self-driving electric car presumably involved a lot of work on battery tech, augmented reality (at least at the world-parsing level), and interesting display tech for the windshield, all of which is heavily relevant for many Apple products. An actual insider gossiping to tell us what directly came from the project would be interesting to see!
- wslh 3y ago
  I imagine the Apple Vision Pro could add safeties to people at the minimum.
- Solvency 3y ago
  I would assume there is very little transferable knowledge from large car batteries to small consumer tech peripheral batteries.
  - kemayo 3y ago
    I don't know enough about battery chemistry to say one way or the other there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
oldpersonintx 3y ago
[dead]
jmull 3y ago
> The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011. One failed product is a testament? I never really understood the Apple car, but I guess you'd consider it a high-risk, high-reward moonshot project. If that's how Apple saw it, then an unsuccessful outcome isn't even necessarily a failure since it's part of the strategy. In this case, being unsuccessful in developing an autonomous car wasn't the failure -- the road to that turned out to be much longer and bumpier than people thought at the time. The failure was probably in letting the project live too long after realizing the project vision wasn't going to be achievable in a reasonable timeframe. The pivoting wasn't the cause of the problems but a symptom. Those probably should have been recognized as death throes, and the project ended sooner.
- kemayo 3y ago
  Yeah, worth considering that Musk has been regularly saying that full autonomous driving will be coming "in 6 months" since 2016-or-so. Assuming that he and Apple were both equally confident in this being a problem solvable in the near-term, the main difference between them is that Apple didn't make any public statements about it... and then eventually gave up when that confidence didn't bear out.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
> It had no steering wheel and would be controlled using Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri. Let me out of this thing right now. Not a popular opinion on HN, but I'm not sure anyone wants a self-driving car.
- kemayo 3y ago
  I want a self-driving car. I'd love to never have to steer a car myself again. I'd need to be very impressed by the technology to go along with not having a fallback steering wheel for edge cases, but I would absolutely want a car that could just do my normal city driving for me without me needing to engage with it. I'd particularly like it if I could get such a car for my teenage child. Because let's face it -- you don't have to be that good as a self-driving system to be better than the average new teen driver.
- specialist 3y ago
  Yup. I hate driving. FSD is conceptually cool. But I'll keep driving myself, thank you. Because I write software. I know not to trust software. (Or humans.) When every vehicle FSD, and our infrastructure was designed for FSD, I'd be first in line.
- throw7 3y ago
  I want a car I can tell to go to the shop for service or call from the airport to come pick me up. However, call me a stick in the mud, but if I'm in the car, I'm gonna be driving.
- dagw 3y ago
  A car where I can fold down the seat and take a nap or watch a movie while it drives me to my destination, who wouldn't want that?
  - gambiting 3y ago
    It's not about the final outcome(which is hard to argue with, obviously everyone would want that), but I understand the sentiment in that I actively don't want a car equipped with all the tech necessary to enable self driving - because it's going to be extremely complicated and costly, not to mention a whole range of privacy concerns that I'm sure a lot of people here share. If we're talking about some ideal imaginary car that's 20k euro and can do self driving with all processing done locally with nothing uploaded to the manufacturer - sure, who wouldn't want that? But we all know it's not at all what the tech is going to be, not for a very very long time, if ever.
dagw 3y ago
I knew a few people who worked for one the traditional car manufacturers back when Apple made the first big car announcement and apparently 'everybody' there sent in their CVs to Apple. The only people who heard back were the people from either design departments or who worked with electronics or software. People who actually work with engineering and building the actual cars, as in chassis, suspension, engines and other stuff made out of metal heard nothing. That was when it became clear to me that Apple had no real interest in ever actually building a car.
specialist 3y ago
I've long thought Apple's best play was to provide OEMs some kind of "VehicleOS" stack, enabling them to compete with Tesla. I doubt most OEMs can build the necessary stack in-house. Then Apple sells some hardware, some software, takes a cut of some services bundles. A fresh new revenue source, without taking on the all risks of making actual cars.
totaldude87 3y ago
|If it ever came to market, an Apple car was likely to cost at least $100,000 and still generate razor-thin profit compared with smartphones and earbuds. I simply dont get this point. i believe they tried to go with a traditional automaker to get over the traditional design issues and manufacturing issues, even with that, a $100000 car would be a lot harder to chew without a steering. I knew Tesaa went this way because , they didn't have the bank to break, but Apple had like $150 billion. even if they are just scratching the surface of ultra premium market, Did they tried to do all at once and failed? Cant they simply buy a EV maker (like rivian as munster suggested) and do what they do best?!

25 points by ripe 3y ago

> Mr. Ive and his team of designers drew concepts for a car that would look like a European minivan such as the Fiat Multipla 600, which has a half-dozen windows and a curving roof. It had no steering wheel and would be controlled using Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri. > One day, in the fall of 2015, Mr. Ive and Mr. Cook met at the project’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., for a demonstration of how the car might work. The two men sank into the seats of a cabinlike interior. Outside, a voice actor read from a script of what Siri would say as the men zoomed down the road in the imaginary car. Mr. Ive asked Siri what restaurant they passed and the actor read an answer, said two people familiar with the demonstration. Tackling one of the hardest technical problems ever attempted, where it was not clear at all whether a solution is even possible (it is still not clear) they seriously discussed the script Siri would read.

ripe 3y ago
I was going to say exactly the same thing. This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes. When you're dealing with very hard engineering problems, you really don't yet know enough to be designing a product. I think it's very interesting that Apple went back and forth on the purpose of the project: were they building an electric car that people could use? Or a self-driving dream car? This is a critical question. Depending on which one you want to build, the process has to be completely different, no? My outsider impression: most Apple groups excel as "productizers" of technology that has already been developed, but perhaps not as developers of technology themselves. I guess the chip making shop that produced the M1 and M2 would not be this type of group.
- culturestate 3y ago
  > This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes. When you're dealing with very hard engineering problems, you really don't yet know enough to be designing a product. I suppose we can get into the weeds on how you define "designing a product," but under the right circumstances targeting a specific experience and working backwards to the technology has pretty clear benefits. Ignoring Apple - because this kind of over-the-top process is just how they're wired - look at something like a modern automatic defibrillator. Literally any human being can use one with zero training because the goal was "make a defibrillator that someone can operate with one button" from the beginning. If your goal is instead e.g. "make this existing defibrillator easier to use," you might still end up with a really good product but you probably don't have something that my mom could reasonably be expected to deploy if she runs across someone having a heart attack on the street.
- GenerWork 3y ago
  >This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes As opposed to engineer-led processes, which as we all know are infallible and always produce products that go to market 100% of the time :) >I think it's very interesting that Apple went back and forth on the purpose of the project This is the real reason it failed. The fact that nobody at Apple could say "this is what we're aiming to do" and then stick to that vision is more telling about Apple culture than it is about any UX processes.
- simonh 3y ago
  It depends where you draw the line in the tech stack. On the hardware side they've always worked at least at the same hardware level as any workstation or PC vendor, and often arguably lower than that working with component manufacturers to custom spec particular components. They're an aggressive early adopter of new tech, putting in the work to adapt it to their product categories, sometimes directly funding tech development with partners to make that happen. They jumped on the tech for laser cutting aluminium laptop and mobile device bodies from aluminium blocks, gorilla glass for mobile devices, helped develop the specs and tech for retina and 5K displays, were actively involved in the development of open technologies like Wifi, USB, Firewire, etc. They've never been content to just buy parts off the shelf, pushing to promote the development of and get early access to new stuff other competitors didn't have. On the software side they hired the best, including about half the former staff of Xerox PARC, the developer of the MACH microkernel, the developer of LLVM. You could argue that Apple didn't invent these technologies, but people at Apple did.
- oldgradstudent 3y ago
  > I was going to say exactly the same thing. This is precisely the issue with UX-led processes. When you're dealing with very hard engineering problems, you really don't yet know enough to be designing a product. It's like the Wright brothers, before working on the Kitty Hawk, worked on mocks up of an online ticket ordering system.
itslennysfault 3y ago
Siri can't even get basic tasks right, and they want me to trust it to drive my car? ....nah.
cube00 3y ago
Bike-shedding at its finest.
kemayo 3y ago
That actually seems like a reasonable thing to do. Early-on going "assuming that we solve the technical issues with self-driving, can we make this into a product that works for us?" makes sense to me. After all, if they found that they couldn't come up with a good experience for it, then they could stop throwing all that effort into solving the hard technical problems.

decafninja 3y ago

While I want autonomous cars to become available if for no other reason than to allow my elderly parents to continue using a car, I have serious doubts that it’s going to come about during their lifetime. Having said that, I’m fully prepared to become their chauffeur at some point in the future. I’ve started looking at bigger vehicles I previously would not have been interested in so that I can drive them around in comfort and luxury. Also curious about what are the Chinese EV manufacturers doing in this space? Are they putting much effort into autonomous driving, are they mainly focused on just making a plain old good electric car?

AlotOfReading 3y ago
Chinese OEMs are putting a moderate amount of work into the space at L2-L3, as those offerings are rapidly becoming mandatory features for flagship product lines. There are Chinese teams working on L4, but it's difficult to get an good sense of their maturity right now.
- decafninja 3y ago
  I could be wrong, but seems only American and European (or just the Germans?) are aggressively pursuing L4+ while Asia (China/Japan/Korea) is focusing more on L2/3 for now?
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    No, there are a large number of Chinese companies that have active L4 efforts. Xpeng, Baidu, weride, pony.ai, etc. They tend to also have partial autonomy (L2-L3) efforts because that's what the Chinese OEMs want to invest in.
- neom 3y ago
  Best read I can usually get is from wheelsboy https://www.youtube.com/@Wheelsboy/videos https://www.youtube.com/@Wheelsboy/videos Some of the stuff he test drives is pretty wild to me, very curious how the next 5-10 years are going to look.

ViktorRay 3y ago

People keep talking about artificial “intelligence”. Please tell me. How “inteligent” are our AI if they can’t manage to drive a car? A task that any 18 year old human with some training can do?

AlotOfReading 3y ago
"AI" doesn't necessarily imply general AI. Besides, it's well known that many of the things we find easy as humans are extremely difficult for computers and vice versa. That observation even has a name: moravec's paradox.
browningstreet 3y ago
That’s what everyone is trying to develop. It’s early days for AI/ML/whateveryoucallit. We’re not at the 3D TV stage of things, where the tech works but no one wants it. More interesting to me is that Apple is making noises about going all in on AI/ML but they decided it wouldn’t help their car efforts. And by car I mean self-driving.
dartos 3y ago
We’ll I don’t think any multimodal model has been trained for 18 continuous years, so we’re not sure yet. Also the word “intelligence” isn’t well defined. Also the word term AI is just marketing. It’s all statistics
two_handfuls 3y ago
Not very intelligent. Yet. Why do you ask?
randomdata 3y ago
AI is not intelligent. That is why we call it AI and not I.
itslennysfault 3y ago
With no training, actually. Anyone can "figure out" how to drive a car. Me and a friend started stealing his mom's car and joy riding at night at 13. No one taught us how to drive. Thankfully, shockingly, no one got hurt and we never got caught.

sfjailbird 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240229094431/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/technology/behind-the-apple-car-dead.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240229094431/https://www.nytim...

kemayo 3y ago

> Apple’s dead car project will be survived by its underlying technologies. The company plans to take what it has learned about artificial intelligence and automation and apply it to other technologies that are being researched, including A.I.-powered AirPods with cameras, robot assistants and augmented reality, according to three people briefed on the projects. It's difficult to get a sense for what actually came out of the car project while it was running. But you can certainly imagine a case where a $1b/year R&D project, at Apple's scale, was giving them acceptable returns to feed into their other products. e.g. a self-driving electric car presumably involved a lot of work on battery tech, augmented reality (at least at the world-parsing level), and interesting display tech for the windshield, all of which is heavily relevant for many Apple products. An actual insider gossiping to tell us what directly came from the project would be interesting to see!

wslh 3y ago
I imagine the Apple Vision Pro could add safeties to people at the minimum.
Solvency 3y ago
I would assume there is very little transferable knowledge from large car batteries to small consumer tech peripheral batteries.
- kemayo 3y ago
  I don't know enough about battery chemistry to say one way or the other there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

oldpersonintx 3y ago

[dead]

jmull 3y ago

> The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011. One failed product is a testament? I never really understood the Apple car, but I guess you'd consider it a high-risk, high-reward moonshot project. If that's how Apple saw it, then an unsuccessful outcome isn't even necessarily a failure since it's part of the strategy. In this case, being unsuccessful in developing an autonomous car wasn't the failure -- the road to that turned out to be much longer and bumpier than people thought at the time. The failure was probably in letting the project live too long after realizing the project vision wasn't going to be achievable in a reasonable timeframe. The pivoting wasn't the cause of the problems but a symptom. Those probably should have been recognized as death throes, and the project ended sooner.

kemayo 3y ago
Yeah, worth considering that Musk has been regularly saying that full autonomous driving will be coming "in 6 months" since 2016-or-so. Assuming that he and Apple were both equally confident in this being a problem solvable in the near-term, the main difference between them is that Apple didn't make any public statements about it... and then eventually gave up when that confidence didn't bear out.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

> It had no steering wheel and would be controlled using Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri. Let me out of this thing right now. Not a popular opinion on HN, but I'm not sure anyone wants a self-driving car.

kemayo 3y ago
I want a self-driving car. I'd love to never have to steer a car myself again. I'd need to be very impressed by the technology to go along with not having a fallback steering wheel for edge cases, but I would absolutely want a car that could just do my normal city driving for me without me needing to engage with it. I'd particularly like it if I could get such a car for my teenage child. Because let's face it -- you don't have to be that good as a self-driving system to be better than the average new teen driver.
specialist 3y ago
Yup. I hate driving. FSD is conceptually cool. But I'll keep driving myself, thank you. Because I write software. I know not to trust software. (Or humans.) When every vehicle FSD, and our infrastructure was designed for FSD, I'd be first in line.
throw7 3y ago
I want a car I can tell to go to the shop for service or call from the airport to come pick me up. However, call me a stick in the mud, but if I'm in the car, I'm gonna be driving.
dagw 3y ago
A car where I can fold down the seat and take a nap or watch a movie while it drives me to my destination, who wouldn't want that?
- gambiting 3y ago
  It's not about the final outcome(which is hard to argue with, obviously everyone would want that), but I understand the sentiment in that I actively don't want a car equipped with all the tech necessary to enable self driving - because it's going to be extremely complicated and costly, not to mention a whole range of privacy concerns that I'm sure a lot of people here share. If we're talking about some ideal imaginary car that's 20k euro and can do self driving with all processing done locally with nothing uploaded to the manufacturer - sure, who wouldn't want that? But we all know it's not at all what the tech is going to be, not for a very very long time, if ever.

dagw 3y ago

I knew a few people who worked for one the traditional car manufacturers back when Apple made the first big car announcement and apparently 'everybody' there sent in their CVs to Apple. The only people who heard back were the people from either design departments or who worked with electronics or software. People who actually work with engineering and building the actual cars, as in chassis, suspension, engines and other stuff made out of metal heard nothing. That was when it became clear to me that Apple had no real interest in ever actually building a car.

specialist 3y ago

I've long thought Apple's best play was to provide OEMs some kind of "VehicleOS" stack, enabling them to compete with Tesla. I doubt most OEMs can build the necessary stack in-house. Then Apple sells some hardware, some software, takes a cut of some services bundles. A fresh new revenue source, without taking on the all risks of making actual cars.

totaldude87 3y ago

|If it ever came to market, an Apple car was likely to cost at least $100,000 and still generate razor-thin profit compared with smartphones and earbuds. I simply dont get this point. i believe they tried to go with a traditional automaker to get over the traditional design issues and manufacturing issues, even with that, a $100000 car would be a lot harder to chew without a steering. I knew Tesaa went this way because , they didn't have the bank to break, but Apple had like $150 billion. even if they are just scratching the surface of ultra premium market, Did they tried to do all at once and failed? Cant they simply buy a EV maker (like rivian as munster suggested) and do what they do best?!