[egd]

Honestly, I agree with @saagarjha further down thread - I think things like AR and personal assistants are much closer to their core model.

Grant the MP3 comparison, though - and that's why I'm trying to understand this. They've got smarter people than me pushing for this.

That said, I do agree the idea that they're fundamentally a company good at making high-tech, well manufactured items cheaper and at a larger scale than anyone else can and extrapolating that to luxury cars as a market is a reasonable and possibly sufficient view of this.

[origami777]

Another way to look at it is that the entire relationship to personal transportation is going to be reinvented over the coming decades. It's going to be very profitable. And who knows where it will take us. I understand why lots of companies are betting the farm on it.

[thx4allthestuff]

Good point. What are people going to do when they’re sitting in their autonomous vehicles? Probably a great time to display an ad for the week’s best selling AR game.

[breatheoften]

I don’t see why this is downvoted — when self driving cars are a reality the car windshield hud will become one of the highest value “displays” around. The computing infrastructure to support this display will also be highly controlled compared to previous generation consumer computing hardware — I think the only model for computing on this surface will be “walled garden”s — if Apple doesn’t want to be locked out of this interface they’ll have to build their own platform for it.

[Klover]

What do commuters do now while using mass transportation? Read the news, read ads or social media, talk, work. You could say that Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Samsung are already big in the “autonomous” section, in that they already provide the information, entertainment and work environment for commuters who do not drive to work.

I think it’s only natural that those companies want to get in on the autonomous car industry, at least for the software side. I’m thinking that it might be more likely that companies who do hardware have a greater interest in it, but so far, from the 3 companies with a hardware side; Samsung mainly, but also Apple and Microsoft, only Apple seems to be putting research into autonomous cars. (I have too little knowledge about Huawei and other Chinese companies to know if they have the same possible reasons or approach)

Perhaps driving to work is mostly an American thing and Samsung and Microsoft see the world going more towards increasing remote work, increasing mass transportation.

It’ll be interesting to see the development. Maybe I will still be alive in 30 years to look back on this comment and see what happened.

[Latteland]

I thought all that people do is listen to podcasts. I usually ride the bus (and listen to podcasts), but when I do drive and suffer through 45 minutes of bumper to bumper boredom interspersed with terror, I listen to podcasts. It's a bad day when driving if I forget to setup my podcasts in order.

There should be a startup opportunity for a smart scheduler, combined with voice integration. There are three types of things to listen to (corpuses?): music, a book or similar on tape, or podcasts. If I'm listening to a book, I probably want to continue listening. I want voice recognition to switch between them. 'play abbey road" already works in my car, but I can't continue the book i'm listening to. I can't ask for my usual daily podcasts - marketplace morning report for 5 minutes, then NY Times the daily, maybe a nasa podcast or something about politics, then yesterday's marketplace morning.

[dnhz]

I'd like to see how all this tech battles motion sickness. Like many people I think, reading while riding in cars/buses gives me motion sickness. This doesn't happen aboard trains.

[jakobegger]

With an AR windshield, you could put the content in the real world. Instagram posts could show up on fake billboards, or tweets could appear to be written on the road. Then you wouldn't get sick because what your inner ear feels matches visual input, but you could still consume your content.