welshdog

toddzrx said:

Autonomous vehicles are turning into the same technology god-send as fusion power: it’s always a few years away. I wouldn’t hold your breath on them. Ten years ago everyone was chattering about how within a decade almost no one would own a car anymore because we’d all be getting around in an autonomous Uber.  Turns out autonomous driving is far more nuanced and complicated than most engineers thought. Personally I don’t think we’ll ever have fully autonomous vehicles driving on our current “dumb” road network. It’s going to require some kind of sensor network built into or near the roads to work. 

I agree. It will 50 years before autonomous cars reach anything approaching ubiquity on the roads. What might happen first is sections of roads and highways will be designated as "autonomous ready", and the cars will be allowed to self-drive in those areas. There are just far too many random details on roads for a vehicle to be able to safely parse all it encounters. Plus, road features change randomly and sometimes overnight, which gives the car systems more to deal with. Rain, ice, snow, leaves, dust can all confuse driving systems. Once a week my street is peppered with trash cans, randomly positioned and on both sides of the street. On alternate weeks huge recycling bins are in the mix. Sometimes the wind blows them over, sometimes the workers don't place them back at the curb. I'd love to see how one of these vehicles deals with all that and then handles a person backing out of their drive, or a child running out from behind a can, a loose dog - or all of them at the same time.

Needed improvement, this may or may not be that.

designr said:

So this is Apple's car play (pun intended). I think this all but confirms that Apple is unlikely to start producing their own car. Why do it when you can own the control, UI and UX and avoid all of the other hassles of building, selling, shipping, servicing, and supporting cars.

I don't know about that, but I do think this new expanded CarPlay is definitely a result of the Project Titan work.

Apple have built what amounts their own automobile OS, why not let current car makers use it, allowing customers to become familiar with it. Then when Apple releases their own vehicle, new customers who like the OS will be drawn to the Apple Car.

This information kind of makes complaints about the "walled garden"model seem less relevant.

If Apple wants into the car manufacturing space, they should make a non-autonomous car first. Figure out how to get that right, build some success, then add autonomy features later. The two versions could be developed simultaneously, with the self-driver planned for a much later deployment. Autonomous cars are not good enough yet and it seems likely that they won't be ready for decades. Not to mention mixing them with standard dumb cars is just not going to go well. Let's not forget all the millions of improvements and changes (and public expense) that will have to be made to all roads in order for these vehicles to be truly safe and successful. I'm 65 and I'l be long dead before autonomous cars reach true ubiquity. Companies will try, they will fail, people will get hurt/killed and then the manufacturers will try it all over again - repeat for a long time.