How Apple’s self-driving car plans can transform the company itself

What would an Apple self-driving car look like? We do not know yet, but what we do know is that the company has serious plans to roll out its own electric self-driving car by 2024.

Apple has not officially confirmed any information released in the Reuters reports that made the news last week. And we still miss a lot of details about the company’s self-management plans. Nevertheless, the news is important, both for Apple and the self-driving automotive industry.

Depending on how the situation unfolds in the coming months and years, the fact that there is a concrete date for Apple’s self-driving car plans may indicate that the company is making a fundamental change in its product development strategy.

The current state of self-driving car technology

The history of self-driving cars largely reflects the decades-long search for artificial general intelligence (AGI): the finish line always seems to be around the corner, but the closer we get to it, the harder it gets.

Like many of today’s AI technologies, self-driving cars had their roots in the 1970s and ’80s. But until recent years, they were limited to academic and military research laboratories and science contests. In the 2010s, advances in deep learning led to major improvements in computer vision, one of the key technologies driving self-driving cars. We finally see cars that can drive in real streets.

Deep-learning algorithms have helped self-driving cars go a long way in exploring challenging environments. But the technology is far from perfect. Deeper learning models are just as good as their training data. If the data is representative of all the situations the self-driving car faces, it will work well. But the actions of the AI ​​will become unpredictable when it comes to fringe falls – new situations that rarely occur – such as a fire truck parked in a strange corner or a overturned car.

Human drivers are constantly encountering new situations, but can handle them thanks to their understanding of how the world in general works. For example, you do not need prior training to know what to do when you see a deer crossing the road. We understand causes and effects, intuitive physics, goals and intentions, and this knowledge helps us (mostly) to make rational decisions when faced with situations we have never seen before.

Some companies use additional technologies such as lidars, laser-emitting devices that create 3D maps of the environment of the car. Lidars can help detect obstacles and people where the computer vision system fails, but it is not resistant to environmental factors and movement, and it does not solve the causal problem.

Apple’s self-driving car efforts

Apple has been conducting autonomous management research since 2014 under the title ‘Project Titan’. But unlike the efforts of other companies such as Uber and the Waymo company owned by Google, very little is known about Apple’s self-driving car project and the company’s progress.

The initial goal was apparently that Apple had to create a car from scratch. In 2016, the company shifted its focus and aimed to develop software for self-driving cars. In January 2019, Apple fired 200 employees from the project and subsequently acquired self-driver Drive.ai in June. In December 2020, the project moved the Titan project under the care of John Giannandrea, the head of artificial intelligence.

The history of Project Titan indicates that Apple has always maintained interest in self-driving cars, but there were never any signs of a plan to launch a product. That changed with the Reuters report, which claims that Apple ‘has made enough progress to build a vehicle now’.

Apple Product Development Strategy

Apple is usually not a first car, but definitely knows when to enter a new market. Apple II was not the first personal computer, but the first very successful computer, which built on a decade of rapid advances in storage and processing technologies and the gradual decline in the manufacturing cost of the pieces needed to make a home computer. to compile.

The iPod was not the first device to play audio files, but it was launched at a very favorable time, when the adoption of digital media reached a critical mass and the market was ripe for high-end products. Same with the iPhone, which entered the scene as mobile communications, internet and computer became common thanks to Nokia and BlackBerry. There was nothing new on the iPhone, but it was a new combination of an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator. ‘

If you look at some of Apple’s other products – the HomePod, Apple Music and Apple Watch – it was never the first of its kind, but a revolutionary version of what already exists. Perhaps, with the exception of the graphical user interface, Apple has rarely ventured into areas where the market has not yet been established.

But the automotive industry for self-driving is still marked by the missed deadlines by all major players. Despite tremendous progress, there is still no real solution to self-driving cars. Uber and Waymo’s self-driving cars have traveled millions of miles, but are still attended by safety drivers. Tesla offers a fully autonomous autopilot feature, but still requires drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel when activated.

Although most experts agree that we will eventually have driverless cars on our roads, there are still many questions, such as how they will look from it, how and whether they will share roads with cars driven by humans, which meet the regulatory requirements is and what the meaning of changing cars.

Training data for the AI ​​algorithms

There is one very compelling reason why Apple would enter an immature and risky market like self-driving cars. Unlike other sectors that Apple has conquered, self-driving cars are heavy on artificial intelligence and are a different development strategy. The deep learning algorithms used in self-driving cars require large amounts of training data obtained by driving cars on roads. Apart from sound engineering and design, you need an AI factory built on top of a solid data infrastructure.

Waymo and Uber collected their data by testing driving their cars in different cities. Tesla, on the other hand, collected its data directly from the hundreds of thousands of cars it sold to consumers.

According to reports, Apple has done small-scale road testing in the past, but downgraded the effort in 2019. The plan to launch a self-driving car at the consumer level may indicate that Apple will adopt a strategy similar to Tesla, which would be a bit controversial for a company that prides itself on getting very little customer data collect.

It may also indicate that Apple, like Tesla, will be phasing out its self-driving technology and gradually developing and refining its AI algorithms as it collects more data from its cars. That would also be contrary to Apple’s nature of delivering near-perfect products. Of course, that could change if the company devises another way to collect hundreds of millions of miles of driving data before 2024.

Who will buy Apple’s self-driving car?

According to a Reuters report, Apple intends to “build a vehicle for consumers”. Also in this regard, Apple’s approach is similar to that of Tesla and unlike Waymo and Uber, which plan to launch robo-taxi services.

But selling directly to consumers raises the question: how much does the car cost? The benchmark we have is Tesla’s electric vehicles with autopilot support, which cost between $ 35,000 and $ 120,000. But while Tesla uses a pure computer vision approach and relies only on deep learning and little help from a leading radar and sensors to navigate roads, Apple plans to include lidars on its self-driving cars.

According to a 2017 estimate, lidars used in self-driving cars can cost between $ 8,000 and $ 85,000, and each self-driving car requires multiple lidars, which can sometimes triple the price of the car. This could force Apple to reconsider its product delivery strategy and serve an autonomous ride in the future.

But the industry is changing fast. There are now $ 100 and $ 500 lidars, and Apple has developed its own lidar scanners at a cost that makes it affordable to embed them in the iPhone 12 and iPad Pro devices. For its self-driving car, Apple will use its own lidars and work with other manufacturers. The Apple car at the consumer level is likely to be more expensive than the Tesla, but by 2024 the cost of the hardware would have dropped to the point that the difference is negligible.

To give up full control?

According to the Reuters report, Apple wants to outsource the production of the car, which is contrary to the company’s preference to maintain full control over its product stack. Apple controls the hardware, operating system, and store window for phones, watches, TVs, and computers.

But even though Apple has decades of experience in managing manufacturing plants and managing complex supply chains, building cars is a completely different challenge, which would justify a partnership with a carmaker.

An alternative would be for Apple to acquire a car business. With more than $ 200 billion in liquid assets, the company could easily buy many leading automakers, including General Motors, and Volkswagen, and build vehicles on a large scale.

The future of Apple’s self-driving car

Throughout its history, Apple has set an example of design, performance and durability (and high prices). But this history of perfection also set great expectations for Apple. Where consumers allow other businesses to fail and recover, they expect Apple to be flawless. And right now, self-driving car technology is anything but flawless.

This may in part be the reason why Apple was reserved until recently and only leaked information about its self-driving car project through anonymous sources. This gives the company the mobility to go back to parts of its plans as the industry and its own project develop. The self-driving car industry is changing fast, and I would not be surprised if what we see in 2024 is very different from the initial report.

But what is certain is that Apple is serious about creating a self-driving car, and that its involvement could have a serious impact on the future of transportation and the company itself.

A version of this story originally appeared on the author’s blog.

Ben Dickson is a software engineer and the founder of TechTalks, a blog that explores the ways in which technology solves and creates problems.