
Apple Expands California Self-Driving Test Fleet to 27 Cars - KKKKkkkk1
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-25/apple-expands-california-self-driving-test-fleet-to-27-cars
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Fricken
Project Titan is such a funny thing. Back when Chauffeur, Google's self
driving car project was the only game in town, automakers found it pretty easy
to dismiss, but when rumours of an autonomous Apple car began to circulate,
the tone amongst car people began to shift. It's what got the automakers
thinking "Is this self driving car jazz for real? Omg it might be for real!
The tech companies are going to eat our lunch".

It took the carmakers a while to figure out which way was up. The Germans
spent $3 billion acquiring Here maps, which was a misfire. Tesla was quick to
implement Mobileye's EyeQ3 chip and single camera system and then promptly
burned their bridges with Mobileye by pushing the system's capabilities way
beyond it's safe design constraints.

Ironically, Apple had succumb to irrational exuberance themselves in moving so
aggressively on Titan. Analysts notes a $10 billion dollar bump in Apple's R&D
budget during the 2 years when Titan was big. Supposedly the project was a
clusterfuck. Steve Zadesky, who was put in charge wanted to make a fairly
conventional car with autonomous features, but Jony I've and a group of
engineers were adamant about developing a robotaxi, which offered the best
opportunity to "reinvent the mobility experience". They couldn't come to terms
and executive leadership of Titan was broken from the start.

So however much things were scaled back, the project definitely isn't dead. 27
test vehicles isn't small potatoes. Maybe Apple still intends to build their
own vehicle, I guess we'll see.

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hi-im-mi-ih
You make some great points here. However, isn't 27 vehicles small potatoes?
Tesla has almost 500,000 cars on the road and it also has 5 billion miles
driven. That's a lot of training data. The approach to self-driving cars is
largely training a model, so the data from 27 cars is actually extremely
underwhelming.

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revelation
Those Tesla cars aren't collecting training data, that's preposterous. They
have a mobile phone connection and some flash storage, so where is all this
data going to?

It's not going over the mobile link, you would need many magnitudes the
bandwidth, and it's certainly not going on the flash storage, because if you
continuously stream raw camera data to flash you will kill it in a year at
most.

(That is before you consider that you want a $100k sensor suite with lidar,
precise wheel odometry and a GPS/INS system to get a ground truth for training
anything)

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dmode
That’s incorrect. Tesla’s connect to home WiFi and use that to transmit large
volumes of training data. Owners have tracker huge packets being moved via
their home connection

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gxs
It's kind of cool seeing tech behemoths battle each other.

They aren't strapped for cash, hire brilliant people, so you really get to see
the impact of different strategies and other factors at play.

I'm, at least, enjoying the show.

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curiouscat321
It's interesting how the incumbent auto companies are competing with
Apple/Google. They have a lot of ways to go to be able to compete for talent.

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empath75
To be honest, I'd be pretty happy if apple would just let me use google maps
with carplay. Can we make that happen before we figure out robot cars, apple?

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sachleen
I can't speak on car play, but I switched back from GMaps to Apple.

I hadn't used it since it first came out (when it sucked) but have found it's
a lot better now. I especially like that it gives me the speed limit, a
feature I wish Google had. I have removed Google Maps from my phone altogether
now.

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andy_ppp
I think outside of the US Apple Maps is still super average.

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omnibrain
In Germany it works well. I actually think the lane indicators for navigation
on the Autobahn are superior to Google Maps. If only I found a way to always
have north up. I get super confused and lose orientation if my map is not
properly aligned with north up.

