Apple Won't Be Building Its Own Autonomous Car... Because Of Boardroom Fights

After disagreements among senior Apple staff reached an impasse over the proposed degree of autonomy, the company has given up on the idea of an Apple Car for the time being, choosing to sell self-driving tech directly to manufacturers instead

Matt Kimberley

23 Aug 2017

Apple Won't Be Building Its Own Autonomous Car... Because Of Boardroom Fights

Apple has dumped the idea of an Apple-branded self-driving car – because senior figures couldn’t agree on what they wanted it to be.

After investing millions of dollars in research and development for technologies related to autonomous driving, Apple has finally reached a point where its own real-world Johnny Cab just wasn’t possible.

According to reports in the New York Times, Apple’s Steve Zadesky had preferred a semi-autonomous traditional car, like any Tesla with Autopilot, while chief designer Jonathan Ive wanted to “reimagine the automobile experience” from the ground up. Each had his own support within the project, apparently causing huge friction.

Instead of building its own, Apple has resolved to simply build tech to facilitate autonomy in car makers’ machines. The idea is to create ready-made packages of tech that can be integrated into cars at the design stage, which will be better value-for-money for a lot of manufacturers.

The team has worked on new ways of disguising the lidar systems that currently sit like awkward vultures on top of driverless cars’ roofs, looking gawky and out of place. They had also experimented with swapping the steering wheel for a sphere that would have given “better lateral movement,” whatever the New York Times journalist means by that. Still, this does mean that at least Apple won’t be dropping a hideous autonomous monstrosity on us, as per the Google car…

Comments

Had they priced it like the rest of their products, the majority of us wouldn’t be able to afford it anyways

iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac, iPaidTooMuch.

Yeah. But it would have actually worked.

Somebody will make a Windows joke, won’t they?

I doubt it because they don’t have windows.

If they did have windows, it would be illuminati

Now that’s a good news

Real reason: they couldn’t agree the number of adaptors you would have to use to charge the car

It probably would’ve got slower everytime you updated the nav system

every time they push out new update. expect your car to slower than the newer iCar by 2 MPH!!!! hahaha

All these Apple hate comments… I’m reading these comments on my iPhone 6 and to be honest, I never had a problem with it

The only problem I have with mine is that a few of the pixels are burned out

I relief that I won’t need to to sign in on iTune before I drive, and when my mom calls me, my wife car and mine both ring at the same time.
Not even mentioning about when Apple release new update, the old hardware suddenly becomes slower, thus reduce my autonomous safety …

Thanks but no thanks. I do the driving myself.
I don’t hate apple. I just find them very inconvenience…

You gotta try out another phone, and then you’ll see what we mean. I used to have an Iphone and then one day I tried out an S7. I quickly switched to android phones and do not regret it at all.