Holy Shit. I would have guessed 400 or so, following the news a couple years ago of Project Titan shuttering plans to manufacture their own vehicle and focus just on autonomy.
I'm not exactly sure how one would keep 5,000 people busy. They've only got 50-something vehicles actively testing on California's roads, thought they could very well have more somewhere else.
It's hard to figure out how many people Waymo currently employs, but but they had around 600 in 2015. I also know they subcontract out remote guidance, data annotation, and map-making to third parties.
But 5000? Wow. They must still be serious about making their own car. wow.
Consider the scale of an automotive manufacturer - General Motors has a technical centre that can house over 21,000 employees [1] which goes to show the scale of people involved in vehicle R&D. For a company that's effectively just dipping it's toes into the industry, 5,000 is understandable
For sure. It's just that I was previously under the assumption Apple had opted not to manufacture a vehicle. So little information gets outside the walls of Apple's forbidden palace.
I follow the self driving car race pretty close, and with Apple there are just so many question marks as to how serious, and capable they are, and as to what their strategy might be.
Mapping systems. Imaging systems. Automation systems. Safety systems. Communication systems. Energy management. Suspension. Energy systems (electrical I presume).
And that doesn’t include all the manufacturing process people that Apple would throw at a problem of any scale, let alone cars.
So yeah, there could be a tons of people, but like most Apple things, very, very few would have access to anything more than a small slice of what is going on.
And in order to fill up at a regular gas station, don't forget or lose your icar special dongle or else the regular gas pump won't fit into your gas tank.
And every once in a while they will just decide to remove a piece of the car and force drivers to adopt new habits - "The iCar 2 will no longer have a steering wheel and all drivers will now steer with their tongues."
And whenever you upgrade the car's OS, everything you are used to totally changes.
Congratulations, your iCar's new OS is successfully installed! Your blinker is now where the washer fluid bar used to be and we reversed your shifter so Park is now Reverse and 1st gear is now 4th. You're welcome!
Oh, and they will change the shape of (or remove completely) the charging plug every couple of years so you have to buy a new one. How do you think they made so much money over the years...they are geniuses!! Bastards, but geniuses.
Wasn't it Phineas T. Barnum that famously proclaimed "There's a sucker born every minute"? Well, Jobs & Co. learned that lesson very, very well.....
I was, once, excited about the prospects of an iCar...back when I still was a believer in the cult of Apple. Then I watched this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8
I would never trust my life to an Apple product, even if it has rounded corners (OMG!!) and they offer avocado, mauve, ecru, and navajo (m___f__ing!!!) white color options... I think different(ly?) now.
