[ars]

Yup, exactly this. They have no idea how to make a self driving car so wasted time on other things hoping someone will solve the actual hard part.

It's pretty common when given an impossible project, and you need to show something.

[coldtea]

Or you know, the have multiple teams, and they don't just want to put out a "self driving car" out, but a great self driving car that rethinks what a car should be like -- on top of "self-driving".

[Superleroy]

But does that even make sense? That would mean they redesigned something that they are not able to build in realistically at least the next 5-10 years. Or to go even further, they tried to make something better that does not exist yet. Wouldn't it make more sense to just go for the self driving car first and then, after you are sure that you can build that, creating teams which make it better?

[coldtea]

>That would mean they redesigned something that they are not able to build in realistically at least the next 5-10 years. Or to go even further, they tried to make something better that does not exist yet.

At Apple don't do basic research and leave it at that.

They are trying to build a commercial product.

In that sense, it makes sense to try to solve the problem of self-driving along with how an Apple car should be like (besides self driving).

So that, if the self-driving research pans out, they have a complete product, not just some run-of-the-mill car design that basically sells for its self driving capability.

And even if their self-driving thing doesn't pan out, they can always enter the car market licensing some other self-driving technology (like they license/buy batteries, ssd, cpus, etc) but with their own spin on the general product.

[ars]

> In that sense, it makes sense to try to solve the problem of self-driving along with how an Apple car should be like (besides self driving).

No it doesn't. Self driving takes decades to solve, designing pretty cars takes a year or two. There is an order of magnitude difference there.

They were seriously trying to constrain the location of the LIDAR before actually knowing what types and numbers of LIDAR a self driving car actually needs! That is utterly backwards.

[coldtea]

>No it doesn't. Self driving takes decades to solve, designing pretty cars takes a year or two. There is an order of magnitude difference there.

They are not the same teams doing each, so there's no opportunity cost involved.

And whether it might or might not actually "take decades", if Apple considered it would "take decades to solve" they wouldn't be interested in it in the first place. The idea was that we are close to a breakthrough and commercial applications, not that we'll have something in the market by 2040, maybe.

So, for Apple it was more like "can we get something out in 5-10 years at most? Oh, and if it just self-drives, nobody will care -- by that time there would be 10 more self-driving cars from Google, Tesla, Audi, GM, etc. We also want it to be great/different in other aspects".

>They were seriously trying to constrain the location of the LIDAR before actually knowing what types and numbers of LIDAR a self driving car actually needs! That is utterly backwards.

There's nothing backwards about it -- given that the car will need a LIDAR (which I don't think their self-driving researchers where doubting), they should explorer the design space for placement/hiding it etc.

[dkonofalski]

I'm not sure why you're arguing with the person that keeps responding to you. I think you've clearly made the point that Apple feels like they don't need to work off of existing design or technology methodologies and yet this person seems to think that Apple's entire predicted failure is that they're not working off of existing processes and technologies. He seems to be arguing a straw man of your argument rather than your actual argument and part of me feels like he's being willfully disingenuous in doing so. It's "Apple can't possibly do it different than everyone else because everyone else has only been able to do it in this one way" without any room for the possibility that the "best" (subjective, of course) solution may be one that doesn't exist yet because it requires the very paradigm shift you're referencing.

[ars]

What you are suggesting is like designing how a hotel will look before you know where it will be or how big it will be.

It's completely backwards. You can kind of do it, but it's a huge waste of time and money.

Apple did not do that because they "knew what they would need, so let's get started", they did that because they had no clue how to make a self driving car, but despite that, the team needed to show something, anything.