How Apple’s autonomous car plans can transform the company itself

What would an autonomous Apple car look like? We don’t know yet, but what we do know is that the company has serious plans to launch its own autonomous electric car by 2024.

Apple has not officially confirmed any of the information released in the Reuters reports that broke the news last week. And we’re still missing a lot of details about the company’s self-management plans. However, the news is significant for both Apple and the autonomous auto industry.

Depending on how the situation unfolds in the coming months and years, the fact that there is a concrete date for Apple’s autonomous 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 autonomous cars reflects a lot of the decades-long search for general artificial intelligence (AGI): the finish line always seems to be just around the corner, but the closer we get to it, the more difficult it becomes.

Like many of today’s AI technologies, self-driving cars have their roots in the 1970s and 1980s. But, until recent years, they were limited only to academic and military research labs and science contests. In the 2010s, advances in deep learning led to major improvements in computer vision, one of the main technologies that power autonomous cars. We are finally seeing cars that can drive themselves on real streets.

Deep learning algorithms have helped autonomous cars go a long way towards challenging environments. But the technology is far from perfect. Deep learning models are only as good as your training data. If the data is representative of all the situations that the autonomous car will face, it will perform robustly. But AI’s actions will become unpredictable when faced with extreme cases – new situations that rarely happen – like a fire truck parked at an odd angle or an overturned car.

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

Some companies are using complementary technologies, such as lidars, laser-emitting devices that create 3D maps of the car’s surroundings. Lidars can help detect obstacles and people where the computer vision system fails, but they are not resistant to environmental factors and movements, and they do not solve the problem of causality.

Apple’s autonomous car efforts

Apple has been conducting autonomous driving research under the title “Project Titan” since 2014. But, contrary to the efforts of other companies like Uber and Waymo, owned by Google, very little is known about the autonomous car design of Apple and the company’s progress.

The initial goal was for Apple to create a car from scratch. In 2016, the company changed its focus and began to aim to develop software for autonomous cars. In January 2019, Apple laid off 200 employees from the project and, in June, acquired the autonomous startup Drive.ai. In December 2020, the company transferred the Titan project to the care of John Giannandrea, its head of artificial intelligence.

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

Apple product development strategy

Apple is generally not a pioneer, but it certainly knows when to enter a new market. The Apple II was not the first personal computer, but it was the first of many successes, based on a decade of rapid advances in storage and processing technologies and a gradual reduction in the cost of manufacturing the parts needed to assemble a home computer.

The iPod was not the first device to play audio files, but it was launched at a very opportune time, when the adoption of digital media had reached a critical mass and the market was ripe for high-end consumer products. The same with the iPhone, which came on the scene as mobile communications, the internet and computing became common thanks to companies like Nokia and BlackBerry. There was nothing new about the iPhone, but it was an innovative combination of “an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator”.

If you look at some of Apple’s other products – HomePod, Apple Music and Apple Watch – they were never the first of their kind, but a revolutionized version of what already existed. 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 self-driving car industry is still marked by missed deadlines by all the major players. Despite the huge progress, there is still no real solution for autonomous cars. Autonomous cars from Uber and Waymo have recorded millions of kilometers, but are still serviced by security drivers. Tesla offers a fully autonomous autopilot feature, but it still requires drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel when it is activated.

While most experts agree that we will eventually have driverless cars on our roads, many questions remain, such as how they will be, how and whether they will share roads with human-powered cars, what will be the regulatory requirements and the meaning of the change in ownership. car.

Training data for AI algorithms

There is a very compelling reason for Apple to enter a market as immature and risky as autonomous cars. Unlike other sectors conquered by Apple, autonomous cars are heavy on artificial intelligence and justify a different development strategy. The deep learning algorithms used in autonomous cars require large volumes of training data obtained when driving cars on the roads. So in addition to solid engineering and design, you need an AI factory built on a solid data infrastructure.

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

According to reports, Apple had done some small-scale road tests in the past, but downgraded the effort in 2019. The plan to launch an autonomous car for the consumer may indicate that Apple will adopt a strategy similar to Tesla, which would be a little controversial for a company that prides itself on collecting little customer data.

This may also indicate that, like Tesla, Apple will launch its autonomous driving technology in phases, gradually developing and adjusting its AI algorithms as it collects more data from its cars. It would also go against the nature of Apple to deliver almost perfect products right off the bat. That, of course, could change if the company finds another way to collect hundreds of millions of kilometers of driving data before 2024.

Who will buy the autonomous car from Apple?

According to the Reuters report, Apple plans to build “a vehicle for consumers”. In this respect, too, Apple’s approach is like Tesla’s and unlike Waymo and Uber, which plan to launch robot taxi services.

But selling directly to consumers raises the question: how much will the car cost? The reference we have are Tesla electric vehicles with autopilot support, which cost between $ 35,000 and $ 120,000. But while Tesla is using a pure computer vision approach, relying only on deep learning and little help from a frontal radar and sensors to navigate the roads, Apple plans to include lidars in its autonomous cars.

According to a 2017 estimate, lidars used in autonomous cars can cost between $ 8,000 and $ 85,000, and each autonomous car requires multiple lidars, which can sometimes triple the price of the car. This may force Apple to reconsider its product delivery strategy and switch to a standalone pickup service in the future.

But the industry is changing rapidly. There are now $ 100 and $ 500 lidars, and Apple has developed its own deal scanners at a cost that makes it affordable to incorporate them into the iPhone 12 and iPad Pro devices. For its self-driving car, Apple will use its own lidars and make partnership with other manufacturers. Therefore, Apple’s consumer car will likely be more expensive than the Tesla, but by 2024, hardware costs may have dropped to the point where the difference is negligible.

Giving up total control?

According to the Reuters report, Apple is looking to outsource car manufacturing, which would be in contrast to the company’s preference to maintain full control over its product stack. Apple controls the hardware, the operating system and the display of their phones, watches, TVs and computers.

But while Apple has decades of experience in managing factories and managing complex supply chains, building cars is an entirely different challenge, which would justify partnering with an automaker.

An alternative would be for Apple to acquire an automotive company. With more than $ 200 billion in net assets, the company could easily buy many top-tier car manufacturers, including General Motors and Volkswagen, and build vehicles on a large scale.

The future of Apple’s autonomous car

Throughout its history, Apple has set an example of design, performance and durability (and high prices). But this story of perfection also created high expectations for Apple. Where consumers allow other companies to fail and recover, they expect Apple to be perfect. And at the moment, autonomous car technology is anything but perfect.

This may be partly the reason why Apple was reserved until recently and only leaked information about its autonomous car project through unidentified sources. This gives the company the ability to maneuver back parts of its plans as the industry and its own project develop. The self-driving car industry is changing rapidly 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 takes the creation of a self-driving car seriously and its involvement can have a serious impact on the future of transportation and on the company itself.

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

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