Apple Car: an autonomous car without steering wheel or brake pedal that struggles to convince

A new report presents some crisp details on the development of the Apple Car. Apple’s autonomous vehicle project has had many twists and turns that raise questions about its launch date.

The website The Information has just published a long report looking back on the eight years of development of Apple’s self-driving car project. About twenty people who worked on the project share interesting information that highlights the ambitions and the difficulties encountered so far by the “Project Titan”.

An ambitious Apple Car with Jony Ive as consultant

Former Apple design director Jony Ive is involved in the design of Apple’s self-driving car as a consultant, through his company LoveFrom. In particular, he advised the team working on the Apple Car to “lean into the weirdness of the car’s design and not try to hide its sensors”.

The Apple Car design details report. We learn that it would have four inward-facing seats to allow passengers to have face-to-face conversations. Of the “large screens that rise behind the seats and lower when not in use” were also mentioned. We also speak of a curved ceiling, similar to what can be found on a volkswagen beetleand a safe that would open and close automatically.

As you can see, Apple wants to create a 100% autonomous car that does not require driver intervention. Thus, Apple hopes “obtain exemptions” from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to remove the brake pedals and steering wheel. But it does not seem to have been won for the Cupertino company yet…

“The Jogger Incident”

This year, a test vehicle from Apple sent the vehicle design team into a cold sweat. As the car was traveling at just 25 km/h, he almost hit a jogger whom he first identified as a “immovable object” before reclassifying it as “still person »then in “moving pedestrian”.

A human driver present in the car had to perform emergency braking to avoid hitting the pedestrian. Apple’s tests indicated that without human intervention, the car “almost certainly would have hit the jogger”. After this incident, Apple opened an investigation and solved the identification problem by adding new elements to its database.

Tim Cook “visit rarely” the offices of Project Titan

According to the report, Apple’s chief executive is distant from the self-driving car project. Some employees told The Information that the project lacks a “singular figure capable of clearly defining and articulating what the product should be”. Tim Cook would also have been “reluctant to engage in mass vehicle projection”which did not really please the senior executives working on the project.

Tim Cook wouldn’t be the only person skeptical about this. This is also the case of Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, although the latter is not directly involved in the Apple Car project.

Project Titan has seen a lot of change in its direction in recent years. Ian Goodfellow, who led the development of machine learning for the self-driving car, left Apple this year. In 2018, Doug Field took over the management of the project. Some Apple employees then spoke of a “era of stability” edited by Filed. Unfortunately for the company, the latter left Apple last year to go to Ford.

Today, Kevin Lynch leads the development of the Apple Car. The company’s goal now is to design a vehicle that looks more like a marketable version to consumers. If the date of 2025 has already been mentioned, the difficulties encountered and the lack of involvement of certain senior executives could delay the project. In the meantime, you will have to turn to CarPlay if you want to taste the Apple experience in a connected car.

Source :

The Information