[telltruth]

Favorite tidbits:

- This is only for experimental self-driving vans shuttling employees. It will have drivers to take control on demand.

- Initially Apple planned self-driving vehicle where 4 seats face each other, sunroof material that gives less hit, electrically tinted windows and holographic windshields.

- Project was abandoned because they realized "designing and building fundamental parts of a new car was not simple".

- Apple tried to partner with someone who can do manufacturing while they do design. BMW, Mercedes, Nissan - all rejected that offer.

- Ive was charged with design. Tim Cook drives BMW so he wanted to partner with them.

- VW accepted the offer because they have been beaten a lot. They will supply basic components while Apple will add others.

It surprises to me no end that a company with $100B in funds, vast experience in supply chain and ability to suck up virtually all talent is struggling so badly at a technology that is over 100 years old while Tesla with its shoestring budgets leap frogged all established players. Goes on to show that leader at the top makes all the difference in the world.

Kudos to NYT for doing investigative journalism.

[solatic]

> It surprises to me no end that a company with $100B in funds, vast experience in supply chain and ability to suck up virtually all talent is struggling so badly at a technology that is over 100 years old

Their supply chain experience is for completely different parts. The suppliers for computer and phone parts are not the same suppliers as those for engine parts, wheel parts, etc.

Apple wouldn't just need to hire the right people - they'd need to build out the factories and supplier relationships and dealer networks and everything else from scratch. Recall that Tesla was founded in 2003, and what you look at now is the product of fifteen years of corporate development - and they're still not on the level of Detroit's Big Three.

Really, Apple would need to acquire a car manufacturer, but when you look at the market caps of various car companies - GM's is $53B, Ford's is $44B, Chrysler's is $34B, BMW's is $56B, and so on - buying a controlling stake in any one of them is doable, but constitutes using quite a lot of Apple's cash reserves. It goes to reason that there'll be opposition within Apple to using that much of the cash reserves on any one bet.

[nazka]

I remember seeing an article where Aston Martin would be a perfect deal. They are doing great cars, you can see they care about quality and design beyond just the luxury segment, and they are cheap. It's valued at $7 billions [1].

I don't like the idea of Tim Cook going to BMW just because he drives and likes BMW however... I think it's a bad way to make decisions.

[1] https://www.motor1.com/news/238922/aston-martin-stock-market...

[devy]

> I don't like the idea of Tim Cook going to BMW just because he drives and likes BMW however... I think it's a bad way to make decisions.

No, I think that's OP and you reading too much in that tidbit. The original quote was this:

   BMW was long Apple’s top choice, given its focus on 
   high-end but mainstream products, former employees said. 
   Many Apple executives, including the company’s chief executive,
   Timothy D. Cook, also drive BMWs. 

So BMW was a top choice not because many execs are driving them but because it's a luxury premium auto brand and sells quite well - which is very similar to Apple brand consumer electronics.

Also, Jony Ive is a car guy, he loves Aston Martins, Bentleys, Saabs and Land Rovers and have a huge collections of them. By your logic, it'd be a "bad choice" to consider Aston Martin simply because Jony Ive loves them :)

[solatic]

Aston Martin doesn't have the manufacturing capacity to support the demand for an Apple car. If there's anything that Tesla has proven, it's that moving from the low-volume luxury segment to high-volume is Really Hard. And while Apple products are very much luxury products, they're still luxury products produced at high volume and marketed to the mass market.

[devy]

I agree. Auto manufacturing excellence is not something money or talents can buy but it takes a tremendous amount of time on top of money and talents to distill.

[telltruth]

Tell that to Tesla.

[serioussecurity]

I keep seeing this meme about Tesla and it keeps making me grumpy. Basic lane keeping is simple, and Tesla is only doing that. And they're doing it badly.

Tesla's autopilot is a PR move to try to raise more capital. They are not and will not be a serious player in driverless cars.

What they've got is a system doing object detection. Object detection is actually one of the easiest parts of driverless cars. Planning and interaction end up being much harder and requiring a lot of data, none of which Tesla has collected. (Also, in practice you need lidar and a fully mapped road, neither of which Tesla has; we're at least a decade from the top players who are actually collecting large scale urban / suburban data from dropping the map requirement, and there's really no reason not to use lidar as the price is dropping so quickly. Both reasons Tesla's "we've got lots of data" claim are BS...)

[brittohalloran]

> you need lidar and a fully mapped road

To play devil's advocate - somehow I drove myself to work today, and the hardware I'm running is just two moderate resolution limited field of view cameras. Not an expert, but from first principles it should be possible to pilot a self-driving car with cameras only, given enough processing power and a smart enough agent. Maybe those last two aren't there in 2018 though.

[sangnoir]

> To play devil's advocate - somehow I drove myself to work today, and the hardware I'm running is just two moderate resolution limited field of view cameras.

This sounds like a fallacy (not sure which one). Just because you can do it does not mean a machine can. There are things that babies can do that machines can't (in 2018).

[baq]

That misses the point. The idea is that a human being is machine running on couple hundred Watts, twenty of which are spent on compute and sensing. There's no reason why a man-made device couldn't replicate the feat.

[sangnoir]

There is, in fact a reason we can't replicate that today, and it's not for lack of trying. We don't have neither the full understanding of the human machine nor the technology to replicate it. As an example, muscles are well-understood, but we haven't been able to make artificial muscles with energy efficiency in the same ballpark. The human brain is much less understood.

I'm not saying it won't be possible at some future date after some hypothetical breakthroughs, but we are far from it presently.

[hndamien]

That is exactly what serious security said - "in practice you need lidar and a fully mapped road". The word "presently", "today" or "with current computational limitations" are notably missing from that statement. It would at least add some ambiguity to a statement that is provably wrong.

[serioussecurity]

So there's a couple things at play.

Lidar range is more than double visual range, in practice.

When figuring out collision avoidance paths for an object you actually end up approximating some np hard problems to find a path that won't have collisions and won't be too "careful".

This ends up being fairly computationally intensive, and adding the extra time significantly improves your planning. Doubling compute time tends to beat doubling your training dataset in terms of system quality, at this scale.

Extra time also turns a number of situations from "guaranteed kill" to "we can avoid the accident", because the car is traveling really fast and those extra seconds can be used to brake, find a new path, etc.

In visibility impaired situations, lidar and vision have different constraints and ways they fail, and the intersection of the two can significantly improve scene understanding ( see waymo's snow demo ).

In a lot of cases, path planning can be dramatically improved by having maps. If you're going into a curve and know the shape of the road, you can preload that and spend your time on more important tasks like object detection and path planning.

Etc etc etc.

This is absolutely not a domain for intuition and thought experiments. The pragmatics of the industry are highly intricate and responsive to constraints that are only visible if you've worked on this stuff.

[taco_emoji]

That's not the only hardware you're running though: those two cameras are connected to a sophisticated object-classification system with around 540 million years [0] of R&D behind it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

[bipson]

The problem is your "smart enough agent" and how to obtain one.

There is something in the middle between your pairs of eyes and your decision making that makes you understand what is actually going on around you: perception/cognition.

If this was so simple as you put it (and in particular just by throwing algorithms and processing power at it), several problems would be trivial by now and we all already would have our personal digital assistants... I mean the real deal.

Well knowing I sound like "dismissive grampa" right now, and yes, we have come far and it is impressive, but I sometimes feel like us nerds/hackers/software guys tend to considerably underestimate most problems, and as consequence the intelligence and efforts of those that came before us.

[blktiger]

Keep in mind that a self-driving car will necessarily need to have a much safer track-record than a human driver. That's what drives the need for more than just two low resolution cameras looking out the front. Plus you need the cameras to be able to look behind and to the sides of the vehicle which is easier to do with more than two front-facing cameras.

[jfim]

Your eyes have significantly more dynamic range than even the best generally available cameras. For example, your eyes can see enough details to walk in a dark room at night while cameras would need additional illumination (flash or IR).

Smart enough is also pretty hard, especially for edge cases. For example, imagine driving on a highway and there's a discarded grocery bag flying around. Based on the flying pattern, it's pretty easy for you to identify such an object if you've seen one before. For a deep neural network, if it hasn't seen enough examples of such objects, it'll fail to classify it properly. What will a self driving car do if it sees an unknown object in front of it while driving at highway speeds?

[nbeleski]

What happens if two cars with LIDAR drive toward each other? Isn't this one of the problems google self-driving car had, where one car interfered with others?

[rjzzleep]

> It surprises to me no end that a company with $100B in funds and ability to suck up virtually all talent is struggling so badly at a technology that is over 100 years old while Tesla with its shoestring budgets leap frogged all established player. Goes on to show that leader at the top makes all the difference in the world.

Look at who's at leadership positions at VW, look at the hierarchies of these old German companies. You're just looking at the money. These companies are too big to fail for the German government.

They're so comfy sitting in those chairs. They know something is wrong, but they don't really feel the heat. In the back of their minds they're just waiting for retirement and want to change as little as possible from the status quo. If they do and something goes wrong, they catch the blame. If they don't and things go wrong, their predecessor is to blame.

That won't stop them from talking about innovation and change all day long though.

In the end I won't tell you trust me, I know, I spent two years in such a place, but I can tell you that once you start changing your perspective the entire madness starts making sense.

[skgoa]

The comment that proves Poe's Law.

[touristtam]

Tesla started by partnering with Lotus who is a well established small automobile constructor. Those guys have made production car as well as racing cars for year. Apple on the other hand went directly to a well established luxury automotive European brand and told them to transfer the technology. Of course the car manufacturer would refuse. The brand impact is too big if Apple is to fail.

The investment for manufacturing a modern car are huge, and you need someone like Musk no Cook to take on the challenge of starting from scratch, and the supplier market for car part is entangled into cartel like behaviour, which will be very hard to break by an outsider.

[jcfrei]

> It surprises to me no end that a company with $100B in funds, vast experience in supply chain and ability to suck up virtually all talent is struggling so badly at a technology that is over 100 years old while Tesla with its shoestring budgets leap frogged all established players.

Tesla still hasn't demonstrated that they are capable of building a mid-range car profitably. And with the ongoing low production numbers for the Model 3 it seems like running a profitable company that mass produces cars is a lot harder than Tesla thought.

[pfortuny]

> It surprises to me no end that a company with $100B in funds, vast experience in supply chain and ability to suck up virtually all talent is struggling so badly at a technology that is over 100 years old while Tesla with its shoestring budgets leap frogged all established players.

Maybe they just want to get into cars but also not burn money in a massive way. Like Tesla is doing.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-burns-cash/

[skgoa]

> while Tesla with its shoestring budgets leap frogged all established players

That's not true at all. Tesla is currently failing at engineering cars, manufacturing cars and their automated driving tech is actively killing people.

[JoeAltmaier]

To be fair, lots of 'automated driving tech' is killing people?

And what they aren't failing at, spectacularly succeeding in fact, is in marketing. They are a household word; their cars are considered the top of the heap as electrics go.

[madengr]

“Apple tried to partner with someone who can do manufacturing while they do design. BMW, Mercedes, Nissan - all rejected that offer.“

Rejected rightly so. That’s pretty smug of Apple. Seems they are forgetting about “design for manufacture”. I can see some hooty tooty Apple “designer” interacting with a group of grouchy, old automotive engineers.

“Initially Apple planned self-driving vehicle where 4 seats face each other, sunroof material that gives less hit, electrically tinted windows and holographic windshields. - Project was abandoned because they realized "designing and building fundamental parts of a new car was not simple".“

This is the attitude of Silicon Valley. Ignoring the “fluff” for some grandeous bullshit. They’d have a holographic windshield that crashed and rebooted constantly. Tesla is learning this the hard way, as they can’t even get their body panels to fit correctly. And I’m supposed to trust them with self driving?

[giancarlostoro]

I didn't think about it, but you may be on to something to watch out for... If Apple neglects the advise of automotive engineers for the sake of visual aesthetics that could be a red flag. Maybe they weren't going to ignore the engineers but didn't give off that vibe to the manufacturers they went to, who knows. I wouldn't want to drive with a car that puts aesthetics before known engineering safety decisions and the like.

Time will tell, I wish Apple the best in any regard. While I personally do not trust self-driving cars fully as a developer (software can and does fail for any given reason, and even car components aren't reliable / long lived enough in some cases, anyone else have that pesky tire air light come on recently? You'd think that sensor would just work kinda thing...) I don't mind some of the tech that could be created out of it, like warning a driver when they're trying to shift to a lane with a car too close for comfort, and other things. In other cases I wish we had self parking cars be much more common, some people just do not park right at all.

[madengr]

The iPhone 4 antenna is a prime example. Designers driving engineering, with a rush to market. People bitch about unsightly cell phone towers, while holding a device whose antennas is not any better than a wet banana peel.

[ralfd]

Antennagate was a none issue. There was one week of bitching, then a grumpy Steve Jobs had the press event were he handed out free bumpers and showed other phones also had the death grip, then the iPhone 4 sold tens of millions and was kept in the lineup even after the 4S next year.

Many of my friends had a 4 and used it for years and none ever complained about reception issues. (They did complain that the button broke after years of use, a real issue of the 4, fixed in the 4S, but with no media frency behind it.)

[TheForumTroll]

>Antennagate was a none issue.

Who are you to decide what is an issue to people? The phones never got fixed (which would be the only fair way to fix this beside giving the money back). It was most definitely an issue for me and I'll never buy Apple until they swap the broken phones or give buyers all their money back.

It makes no difference if other phones did it as well. That is an extremely poor excuse.

[giancarlostoro]

I forgot about the iPhone 4, heh and then they claimed "you're holding it wrong" which I thought was a ridiculous cop out. You designed it wrong! Own up to it!