Apple spends less than its chief competitors on research and development, both in total dollars and as a percentage of its revenue.
Still, the company spends far more now than it did before Tim Cook ran the company.
Apple is working hard on a self-driving car project, but company co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak seemingly isn’t convinced that autonomous vehicles will be ruling the roads anytime soon.
At a recent auto conference, Woz pulled back his predictions about when self-driving cars will take over; saying that there are too many challenges in Level 5 autonomous vehicles.
A car designed to test Apple’s self-driving system was involved in a minor accident Monday, but a human was driving at the time. This is only the second such crash of an Apple car on record.
Google, and its autonomous vehicle spinoff Waymo, haven’t been so lucky over the years.
Apple stays quiet about it, but the company is clearly developing a self-driving car. And this week the world was given a glimpse inside this project, showing that it’s much larger than many had previously thought.
The FBI arrested a former employee on Apple’s autonomous car design team for allegedly downloading proprietary information and attempting take it to a rival car company in China. The resulting documentation reveals the number of employees on the project.
For the last few years, Apple has been investigating making autonomous cars, even though this is well outside its core competency of computers and their accessories.
The move leaves many observers scratching their heads, but a pair of analysts put together reasons why self-driving automobiles should be Apple’s next product category.
Jaime Waydo is leaving Google’s Waymo for Apple. This should help silence anyone who doubts that Apple is serious about its autonomous car efforts.
Waydo describes her old job at this Alphabet subsidiary as “Helping make self driving cars a reality!” Presumably, that’s what she’ll be doing in her new position too.
What do crop circles have to do with Apple? No, it’s not 1996 — when an Apple laptop was used to save the world from aliens in Independence Day.
Instead, a new report claims that an image on Google Earth depicts a former Fiat Chrysler Automobiles facility in Arizona that Apple may be using to test autonomous vehicles. A satellite image shows a “proving ground” with urban street configurations, such as crosswalks and intersections, which would be necessary for putting a self-driving vehicle through its paces.
Waymo offered a first look at its fleet of hybrid Chrysler Pacifica minivans today, showing off vehicles that pack an array of sensors and software that enable autonomous operation.
The self-driving fleet of 100 minivans from Waymo (which is run by Google’s parent company, Alphabet) will hit the streets in early 2017.
The Apple Car has its share of skeptics, but there’s at least one person who believes it is coming, and he should know: Tesla founder Elon Musk says it’s an “open secret” that Cupertino is working to become Coupe-rtino. Get it?
If Apple really is working on a car, what would it look like? And what would we want it to look like and do?
The growing chorus of rumors about Apple’s possible automotive ambitions — and the hard facts about the car designers it’s already recruited — don’t prove Cupertino is working on a car. But if Apple is staffing up to transform the transportation industry, what features might it deliver in its human-transport device?
Here’s what we’d like to see in the very first iCar.
