It's hard to see what compelling offering they could bring having started so late in the game, considering what the pioneers like Google have been doing.
Self driving cars are coming off peak hype and beginning their long descent into the trough of disillusionment.
If we're talking about a robust, reliable, commercially successful transportation service, really, nobody is early.
CEOs are talking ~2020, but the roboticists are like 'well, actually there are some fundamental unsolved problems that have to be adressed before level 4 autonomy can be much more than an amusement park ride.'
Google pioneers like Anthony Levandowsky and Chris Urmson are talking 30ish years now before we'll see unmanned cars driving across the country. This may have something to do with why so many google vets have jumped ship over the last year.
> Google pioneers like Anthony Levandowsky and Chris Urmson are talking 30ish years now before we'll see unmanned cars driving across the country. This may have something to do with why so many google vets have jumped ship over the last year.
> But he took exception to the notion that Google was announcing any sort of delay, instead describing Urmson's new decades-long delivery window as an "expansion" of what he has said in the past.
There seems to be no change here. Silicon Valley will have autonomous taxis in this decade. You can't guarantee 100% of new cars sold will be autonomous until you have a plan for Calcutta and Barrow, Alaska.
We'll see autonomous cars being implemented quite soon, but don't expect to see some kind of Uber-like conquest for world domination in the next decade. It will be slow, plodding, and bound by the constraints of the technology.
And John Leonard at MIT has said in the last couple years "not in my lifetime." He's in his forties or so. At least the particular quote I looked up was "taxis in Manhattan."
It's certainly possible that at least subsets of highway driving could come much sooner. Which would be useful but you don't get to the whole potentially not own a car until you can self-drive without a human present on most roads under a wide range of conditions.
Rewind to December 2006 and I could just as easily imagine someone saying the same about smartphones.
It's early days in self-driving cars, and Apple has a lot of talent, a ton of cash, and (generally) a huge amount of desire to nail the user experience in ways other companies cannot or will not. Clearly their project is experiencing issues, but I wouldn't count them out.
The difference is that people working on the Apple car project "struggled to explain what Apple could bring to a self-driving car that other companies could not". I doubt Jony Ive faced such a struggle with the iPhone.
A lot of people said exactly that. The established smartphone people were quoted as saying, approximately, this stuff is hard, and PC people aren't just going to walk in and take over.
However, just because that sentiment was wrong in 2006 doesn't mean it's wrong now.
In hindsight, what was important about smartphone isn't what the established companies thought was important. Apple's core competencies translated over extremely well to what was actually important, which turned out to be user experience, full internet access, apps, and such, rather than things like telephony and data frugality which is what the established players concentrated on.
It's possible that the same thing would play out with cars. But I'm skeptical, and I'd want to see some explanation of just what advantages Apple would have, not just "they did it before with phones."
It wasn't obvious at all. The leap from the iPod of the time to the first iPhone was massive. If it was so obvious it wouldn't have caught the entire industry off guard. Apple changed the entire industry with the announcement of the iPhone. If it was obvious to you I hope you bought massive amounts of Apple stock back in '06.
You keep calling them "late" without explaining how or why. What key metrics would you look for to dub them 'not late'? How are the Ubers and Googles of the world doing in comparison? You may be right, but I want specifics.
Obviously I'm expressing an opinion here. One metric is talent availability. Uber has already hired the available talent. They hired half of CMUs robotics department - presumably with juicy stock options. Apple, being a large public company, isn't in the same position to offer such incentives to lure away the talent. The other metric is data. Uber and to a lesser degree Tesla have been accumulating data for some time. This business is all about talent and data.
I'll also add that this is a service economy, and while Apple get accolades for their physical products, even Apple fans say that their service offerings kind of suck.
