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by ars
3218 days ago
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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. |
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Well, you know most things. You know you're making a car, you know it will have LIDAR, you know it will be self driving etc. You are free to (and if you want to win time, you pretty much got to) design the car, the interior, materials, displays, etc -- even the transmission, engine and wheels -- independently of the self-driving algorithms.
If and when those self-driving algorithms are ready, you don't then have to spend another 1 year to design the rest.
There's not any real dependency between them -- so much that you can even test your self driving algorithm in ANY random car as almost all companies do. It's not like being a self-driving car dictates the car form and the latter has to be designed around that property.
(That said, before even Google's car and the self-driving hype, a lot of rumors insisted on Apple merely making an electric iCar -- Tesla competitor, not some full self-driver type 5).
>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.
I, for one, have no doubt that Apple got some top notch researchers in ML and driving car technology. I also have no doubt they got some top notch car guys (plain car). I also have no doubt that there's nothing to know about "how to make a self driving car" that the Apple team doesn't know (or any team for that matter), apart the ML/self-driving algorithm aspects. So there was nothing about the form of the car holding them back.