[Animats]

The project has suffered from repeated changes in direction that have hurt morale and led to hundreds of departures from its peak of more than 1,000 members two years ago, five former Apple employees said. ...

Instead, Apple has signed a deal with Volkswagen to turn some of the carmaker’s new T6 Transporter vans into Apple’s self-driving shuttles for employees — a project that is behind schedule and consuming nearly all of the Apple car team’s attention, said three people familiar with the project.

This is more like "we give up, but will do a symbolic project so we don't look too stupid."

This is harder to do than the web/mobile crowd thought. This is hard real time high-reliability, like avionics. Google/Waymo gets this. Most of the others don't. So far, Tesla, Uber, Volvo, and Apple have failed. Not sure about Cruise yet, but I saw one of their vehicles get stuck behind a double-parked car in SF and the human had to take over.

[brisance]

Your Google bias is showing. How have the other companies "failed"? Apple hasn't even started and it has "failed"?

[Animats]

"Hasn't even started"? They had a thousand people working on self-driving cars at one point.

[brisance]

Can a product be considered a failure if it was never made available for sale to the public? This is exactly why Apple is secretive about its projects. Sure, there have been true failures like the iPod Hi-Fi, the eMate, the 20th Anniversary Mac etc. But to consider the car project to be a failure is presumptuous and premature.

[sangnoir]

>Can a product be considered a failure if it was never made available for sale to the public?

Yes.

[brisance]

So Grab, Didi Chuxing, Go-Jek etc do not have self-driving cars projects. Have they failed? Are they failing?

[manigandham]

If they never started those products, then those products have not failed since they never existed.

There's a difference between a product and a company by the way.