This has gotten a lot of attention over the past couple of days:
Kia has approached potential partners about a plan to assemble Apple Inc.’s long-awaited electric car in Georgia, according to people familiar with the matter....The likelihood of a final agreement was thrown into question when Kia’s parent company, Hyundai Motor Group, said last month, then sought to play down, that it was in negotiations with Apple to cooperate on an electric driverless car.
....Hyundai has talked to Apple about investing more than $3 billion in a deal that would see its subsidiary Kia begin building cars under the tech company’s brand as soon as 2024, a person familiar with the matter said. Under such an agreement, up to 100,000 vehicles could be assembled in the first year in Georgia, where Kia has a factory, the person said.
For some reason, all the articles about this have focused on the production of physical cars, which is frankly not very interesting. There are already lots of cars on the market, and plenty of electric cars as well.
The only interesting thing about all this is that, apparently, Apple plans to bring a driverless car to market "as soon as 2024." That would be big news if it were true, but I've read nothing recently suggesting that Apple is anywhere near this far advanced in driverless technology. I'll grant that Apple is the master of secrecy, but there's a limit to how secret you can get with this stuff. You have to have trials, you have to get permits, and you need to collect mountains of data. A few test cars won't do the job; you need whole fleets of them—and needless to say, those fleets all have to be very public.
But then again, Apple has been working on this for years, and I suppose it's possible they're farther along than anyone thinks. What's more, a huge production deal with Kia certainly suggests they feel pretty good about their chances of success.
If Apple is serious about the 2024 launch date, they'll be joining a crowd of car manufacturers who are talking pretty publicly about having driverless cars in the 2023-2026 timeframe. Even assuming that everyone is being optimistic, it does suggest that by 2025 or so driverless cars at reasonable prices are finally going to hit the market. Like so many things related to AI, it will have taken way longer than anyone predicted back in the aughts, but that doesn't mean it was all claptrap. It just means it was harder than anyone thought.
Do we trust what Apple said about this? I rather think we can trust them to say in 2024 that they will bring a self driving car to market "by 2027...
Self driving trains are already a reality. Because train infrastructure restricts a train's freedom of movement and already includes a lot of automated safety equipment. Cars operate in an environment designed for humans. This is the problem.
At any rate of all the stupid vanity projects out there self driving cars is probably the stupidest of resources in a time when serious problems urgently need solutions.
Not to worry about your Apple self-driving car. If anything goes wrong just hit the big button to go back to the beginning.
OT since this is about Nevada, not Georgia, and technology firms in general, not Apple ... but is this going to be future?
NV guv wants to give corporations the same authority as governments, inc. ability to raise taxes, run schools, etc. Egad. Isn't it enough that many pols are already bought and paid for by big companies?
Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a plan to launch so-called Innovation Zones in Nevada to jumpstart the state’s economy by attracting technology firms, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Wednesday.
The zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts and provide government services.
https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/1357681289009233926
omg is this guy a load of crap.
The government mandating paying a tax directly to the East India Company was what caused the Boston Tea Party.
I'd go with the RoboCop model.
And I really love the TV commercials shown in the background in that movie.
That is definitely the wrong kind of self-driving car.
It is at moments like this that I wish WordPress had a like button. Bravo!
Nevada, the gangsters paradise.
The Mormons & the Moolies collaborating to take over the Earth...
This is what happens when Bad meets Evil (& we hit the trees harder than Vietnamese people).
omg genius edgelord invents feudalism!
That is so edgelordy!
Based on the kinds of censorship I've seen coming out of Disqus, God, I hope not!
The Apple driverless car will be released about the same time as their “Airpower” wireless charger.
I promised not to retire until, on my last shift, I can pop open a bottle of champagne and ride home with my feet on the dash and "Nananana" blasting from the speakers of my autonomous car.
The horse knows the way.....we're just coming around full circle.
If you report on driverless cars every so often, as you do, some day you're going to be right.
But what ethical system will they use?
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/self-driving-car-ethics
Is the certainty of Our Robot Future predicated on futurists* thinking Minority Report** was a documentary?
*More in the Kevin Drum way of futurism than Eric Garland.
**Granted, Spielberg's view of Washington, D.C., 2051 was pretty cool. Also, the last truly great movie from either Ol' Casting Couch himself or the Forever Yung Dianetician. (I did really enjoy Bridge of Spies & Ready Player One, as well as Tropic Thunder & Rogue Nation, though.)
Yes, it's a lot harder than people thought. And there's more of an incentive. It's an outgrowth of online ordering as well as Uber.
Kevin's "driverless cars are just around the corner" posts are becoming a lot like Friedman units were for the Iraq war. They are always 3 years away.
Suck. On. This.
Wait a minute!
Weren't we also supposed to be ruled by evil AI machines in 2025? Is this a conspiracy?
Driverless cars will of necessity be an inferior mode of transportation until every single person-controlled car is off the road -- because it will take anywhere from 20% to 40% longer to get everywhere. That's because the speed limits will need to stay the same for the human drivers, but the automated cars will of necessity not be allowed legally to exceed the posted speed limit. So it now takes you 10 minutes to get somewhere 3 miles away; it will be 15 minutes for that excursion. A five hour trip on Interstates may well turn into a six hour trip.
The whole system depends on almost everyone intelligently exceeding the posted speed. Up to 10 mph over is generally accepted. On some urban expressways that still have a 55 limit even though it is outside of the congested areas, cops won't stop you at 75 because almost everyone else is going 70. I don't think artificial intelligence will ever match the human eyes, ears, sense of touch and the brainpower needed to successfully navigate anything as complicated as driving in complex situations. How about the chaos of drop-off zones at extremely busy times at a major airport? I don't see how anyone could possibly pre-program a car to deal with that, and it's too infrequent for the AI learning function to pick up all the nuances of what you do in those situations.
When all the human drivers have been taken off the road, it will be possible to raise the speed limits to approximately the speeds drivers actually travel at now, or maybe even higher, since a computer will be managing all of it. Do we have the patience for a 30-40-year transition period? Why bother? Deliveries, sure, but they will be slowed down, too, and anyway, how about drawing the line and saying a human job for that is simply the cost of doing business?
I remember an article reporting how easy it was to intimidate autonomous vehicles, at four-way stops, for example. I can imagine one dropping you off at the airport, but never being able to leave as human drivers cut it off, double- or triple-park alongside, stop millimeters away, etc.
California lists Apple with just a driver-attended testing permit. Waymo is just one of six companies with a driverless testing permit. This stuff is hard.
Hubris mixed with equal parts of naïve optimism and blind ambition?
Several years ago, it was said that state legislatures would be looking at things like making the driverless car company responsible for any and all liabilities that their cars might be involved in.
In our largely corporate-owned government structures, I assume that this is being watered down and made for corporate--friendly and less old-fashioned driver friendly.
Does anybody have any solid information on this? Could Kevin or someone research this? Are Personlal Injury lawyers lobbying to make sure they can sue these companies, are they developing strategies to sue these companies even if the legislatures are lax ?
In general, I would really appreciate it, if EVERY article on driverless cars by ANY author would talk about the insurance issue -- this is the major way this potential development will effect the vast majority of drivers and passengers.
I second the motion (heh). Unless there is a lot going on behind the scenes, I would expect the insurance issues to be as big an obstacle to self-driving cars as the technical challenges.