Apple dials back car's self-driving features and delays launch to 2028

The world's first non-repairable car.

Apple's phones have about 7 years of first-party support / guaranteed useful life, compared with the rest of the industry's standard of maybe 2. Yeah I'd never buy a car that will only be good for 7 years, but let's see what they ship.

Rivian isn't far behind, with basic body work costing tens of thousands of dollars

https://www.autoblog.com/2023/10/04/rivian-r1t-fender-bender...

Nobody will ever need to drive further than 640,000 yards!

In-app purchase on your iPhone while inside the car? Surely they've got to take 60% for that, for also facilitating the space you're sititng in.

The only problem is to charge the car you have to turn it upside down because the charge port is on the bottom.

They wouldn’t be the first. The Audi A2 launched without a bonnet you could open. Oil changes were done using a hatch in the grille.

The world's first non-repairable car. Minor fault, major accident, or inevitably-degraded battery? No problem!, just throw it away and buy the latest model, like you would with a phone or tablet! You wanted an upgrade anyway, didn't you?

No big deal. Just buy the AppleCar AppleCare plan.

In my limited experience the TCO for Apple computer products seems lower than equivalent PC products. A MacBook I can reasonably expect to stay in the same condition until like 7-10 years later. With a regular windows laptop the screen would be flickering, the keyboard would be worn down, and it would overheat intermittently.

I can open my 2012 MacBook Air right now and expect it to work just fine.

I see that someone has worked at an AASP before.

shudders I can imagine their online interactive training right now...

Build quality - that's not an issue anymore

Interiors - yes they can improve

Never had an issue with after-sales support.

My 2nd Tesla in 5 years.

How is Apple going to have better quality? Apple specializes in making devices with almost no moving parts. Mechanical products are very different.

Improve? Every other iphone I see has a broken screen. Anecdata sure but I've never owned one as I value my money but it seems to break easily.

The windshield will probably break from hitting bugs, but fret not, there's a windshield protector you can get from your authorized dealer.

Elon's antics are wrecking Twitter, but Tesla is chugging along nicely all the same. Most of the world doesn't follow or care about Silicon Valley CEO drama in the same way that we here on HN do.

Tesla's hardware certainly is minimalistic though, and hence the Apple analogy. The software inside an iPhone is ferociously complicated, but the slab of glass, no buttons form factor is much simpler than the Nokias etc it replaced.

There's been a long term trend in Apple hardware of simplification (removal of buttons, ports, flourishes, etc.). The iPhone was a big jump in that direction from the Blackberry, but I can't imagine an Apple Car being that different from a Tesla/Rivian/BYD one.

It's minimalistic, as far as is possible in a vehicle. The best part is no part, the even better part is one you never have to think about. I don't have to turn my car on or off, don't have to change the oil, don't have to think about headlights or wipers, don't have to fiddle with climate control. The car is designed around being driven and nothing else.

I certainly wouldn't call that minimalistic.

Surely you jest. A fart app is automotive minimalism!

People can even open the door the first time they ride in one

Found an iPhone in the snow on Sunday. Had to google how to unlock it / get contact information. "swipe up" it said on the screen. Nothing happened. It was a lie. You need to "swipe from the bottom of the screen". Not intuitive at all.

If minimalism means intuitive, I no longer find the android/ios ui minimalistic either. They've gone to a system of gestures that aren't particularly intuitive.

The buttons were far more discoverable.

100% this. I don't think Americans in general are aware of what the current state of Chinese cars (EV and gas) is like right now since they're not in our market. It's worth checking out some YouTube videos, this guys channel is pretty good for Chinese EVs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmQPwlHixWo

BYD is also subject to C-NCAP safety standards, not NCAP, which is much less stringent. Does BYD make an NCAP compliant car?

Someone in 2006 asked what Apple would bring to the cellphone market, too.

And that would be a fair question. The iPhone never did anything others weren't already doing, nor has Apple ever done that in recent history. They sell products not because they're better, but because they've convinced people Apple is cool.

The iPhone wasn't that big of a leap. At that point, they had 30 years of experience shipping computers, and 5+ years shipping handheld devices.

Of course they will. It's been billions spent on development to just offer you a slightly cheaper taxi ride, with no clear path to any kind of viable commercial service beyond "ok-ish" taxi provider in few American cities. Someone will get bored of it eventually and it will get shut down.

waymo really isnt that confident. No way the avg human driver would be as hesitant as this.

https://youtu.be/Y6GxDr0L-64?t=1589

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN0MLclnWa0

https://youtu.be/XOuG1MQSvYM?t=1287

My primary purchasing criteria for my next car is how easy it is to recover my iPhone when I drop it between the seat and the center console. Surely Apple will solve this problem in an elegant way.

especially considering how we can't import cars from China.

Are you referring to the US tax credit rules around battery origins or vehicle import tariffs? Because there certainly isn’t an actual ban on Chinese-made cars in the US. You can go down to your local Buick or Volvo dealer and buy a Chinese-made car today.

A phenomenal commuter EV for between $25k-30k would do incredibly well in the US.

It doesn't look like a huge market, mostly because there are enough alternatives that are all relatively similar.

But an EV at a competitive price would take a very large slice of that pie.

Tesla has no special sauce that I'm aware of.

Manufacturing of both cars and batteries. That's vertical integration. While I think their current overselling of Autopilot is going to be a folly for them, their assistive driving suite alone would be a multi billion dollar business. They have taken on a ton of risk, and they certainly have their problems, but their successes are substantial and are nothing to wave away.

Tesla has no special sauce that I'm aware of.

At first, Musk's stated goal was to make EV's viable. I feel like that Tesla is well on the way to that, in ways nobody thought possible.

Assuming he hasn't changed his mind, there may come a day he just calls it quits.

But to your point, I would agree - Tesla has no particular special sauce. I am waiting until Waymo FSD finds its way into consumer cars you can drive all over the country before I buy one of them.

2-3 years ago, I was thinking something similar along the lines of "yeah, why doesn't Apple just stick with computers/phones/peripherals/software." But if anything's become clear in the last few years in the EV market are issues with: reliability, software/firmware, usability, aesthetics, build-quality, and high startup capital requirements. Apple is a perennial expert UX/design/durability/usability. Sure there's been a few boondoggles over slight decreases in QA and quality (butterfly keyboards)--but at the end of the day, most of us still love at least some of their products because they still, usually "just work". Apple is also quite good (whether or not you like it) at building walled gardens. Imagine if Apple released a rock-solid car and an absolutely kick-ass charging network that rivals Tesla's? There's be demand. The biggest, most-obvious reason why Apple could succeed at building a car is that they have massive amounts of cash. The #1 reason these fly-by-night EV startups fail is because they can't handle 5-10 years of negative margins coupled with massive capital costs. Apple could burn billions before their EV division becomes profitable and not even blink.

Dumb, ICE-based cars were a poor fit

Our "dumb" Audi A6 ICE vehicle has just as good or better self driving and parking as most EVs on the market, so not sure why we are coupling these together.

Apple will never build cars. Each dollar of car revenue will hurt their margins. It doesn't matter how lux the car is or the target market, it isn't going to happen.

Tesla isn't going to be able to hold their margins, either.

It's going to be more like Nvidia - Nvidia captures all of the margin in the servers - with some going to Intel or AMD - and SuperMicro, Lenovo, HPE, etc. eke out their existence on the low value chassis.

It’s much simpler to me than all that. To maintain the growth percentages that Apple has seen, there are only a few markets that Apple can enter to make enough money to keep growing at the same rate. Otherwise growth stops and then the stock price tanks. So Apple needs to get into American healthcare, cars, or housing.

The fact they chose cars is not that it’s a natural fit. It’s that it’s the only fit.

Also of note: while Tesla sells half of EVs, that’s still a small share. It’s not hard to imagine EVs as a whole still being at single digit market share in 2028.

It’s one thing to compete with iOS and Android, where the combined market share is nearly 100%. It’s another to compete with players who don’t add up to 10%, the market is still wide open.

Tesla’s special sauce, currently, is their charging network. I’ve driven both Tesla’s and non-Tesla EV’s. The public charging experience for Tesla is considerably better. I guess when everyone adopts NACS in the next year that may change though.

It's a fair question, which was also raised when the iPod was introduced.

I don't know. Benefit of hindsight, but you can see the line between computers and iPod. The line from selling iphones and rent seeking on casinos for children to CAR seems less clear to me.

The "special sauce" for Tesla is in the manufacturing, or as Elon Musk likes to say, "the machine that built the machine." Musk has built a corporate culture that drives innovation and change at breakneck speeds. Seek out a few Joe Justice videos to dive deeper into this.

Tesla has upended the way cars are being built with mega casting and structural battery packs. Their next-gen car will be another step change with the "unboxed" method.

The odds of anyone catching Tesla is about nil. Apple's chance may be less than that. Are they going to pay BYD to make cars for them and lose that margin?

Because Tesla was, is, and will continue to be overvalued as a car company. Why pay the “tech premium” for a manufacturing firm when you already have all of those core competencies in house?

they could've acquired Tesla in an all cash deal, but for some reason didn't.

Muskeeter wanted Apple CEO position in return

I think they would've made a great match.

Ask that to Mr. Cook :-)

Agree. "software is eating the world" someone once said a decade ago, and yet most car companies still didn't get the memo. MBux, anyone?!?

Personally, if Apple creates a standard car simply with a great software experience (I'd expect at least a few small novelties), and not too expensive, then I am totally in.

How do you come to the conclusion that traditional OEMs are terrible at the sensors, software, and UX?

For example, Daimler/Mercedes is developing for years toward self driving cars. They had working prototypes in the 1970s with "electronics" based on analog designs that was working as good as a modern Tesla FSD, with the exception that it required lots of space. Mercedes/Daimler is the reason why we have cheap ultrasonic sensors in modern cars. They developed that in the 1990s together with then Temic. They had a working self-driving prototype during that time. All that lead to cheap sensors we use today daily for adaptive cruise control in every modern car by any OEM. Mitsubishi had for sometime the best in class safety system with sensors able to detect pedestrians, like kids, and bicyclists.

MobilEye is now developing self-driving capabilities for years, and IRC first used by BMW for safety features in their models. Only later Tesla used the system in ways which were never consumer ready. That'S why they finally split.

The things is OEMs are conservative introducing features to consumer. Because nobody wants to risk its brand to devalue. Its not only that, if there are too many accidents that would mean that the insurance will have an extra premium, which would lead that consumers don't buy such cars.

So I was driven in car in the early 2000s with features that are rolled out just recently, like the level 3 by Mercedes on highways.

The things is, most just don't see how much things are going on under the hood. They just see the MMI/entertainment system. Yes, that was for long not as high value proposition.

Why is that interesting? How are AirTags useful for cars?

this might be the away-from-homepod

iPhones are just absolutely everywhere

... in the US. iPhone market share is much lower in other countries. I do wonder if it's low enough to affect things like their Find My network.

iPhones are much less pervasive outside of US.

"Thanks to our best sensors yet, Apple Car will not run over any person wearing any Apple product" (applause)

Perhaps those investors should sell their shares instead.

And Apple doesn't have to admit anything. They have never promised a car, they don't even have to acknowledge such a project ever existed if they cancel it.

No way Apple will touch a 100 year old car company with a 10 foot pole

right. it's not about the machine that makes the machine, it's about the machine that makes the machine that makes the machines.

Ah yes, the fraud who caused the EV revolution and has the highest loyalty car brand in the US, and also created the best-selling car in the world.

I'm not going to pull up the rules, but this breaks at least one. Please argue in good faith.

Apple has basically been making cars for 16 years.

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

– Palm CEO Ed Colligan

To be fair, there's still a lot of metal-bending (or carbon fiber forming, which the old dinosaurs learned quickly enough) going on when you make an EV. After all, you're still trying to move two tons of sprung mass over a bumpy surface as smoothly as possible, without any of the thousands of individual parts rattling or letting in water.

The Germans pretty much dropped the ball on software and UX from the very beginning. But they're still decent enough at bending metal around batteries and electric motors, and that seems to be enough for huge profits.

The Vision Pro’s existing sales have already justified the project. They have sold 560+ million dollars worth of them at presumably insane profit margins.

I think Apple’s strategy is to just execute whatever the next tech thing is better than existing participants. MP3 players weren’t a forever thing, but they were a very profitable thing for Apple. Watch, tablet, 3D glasses etc timed after someone else proved the market and just in time for Apple to slurp up the most profitable slice of the pie.

They don’t want to be the first self driving car company, they want to be the most profitable self driving car company.

I think this is exactly right. Notice how they actively avoid AR/VR words, preferring spatial computing. I think this is because, to them, AR/VR are going to be much more compelling than spatial computing, and they don't want to sully those efforts by mixing it with this stepping stone we have now.

Like what?

My guess is they just wait for the market to figure it out, then pull a Sherlock and corner that market.

I imagine the Vision Pro is more like the Newton of the 21st Century. (Or perhaps the Pippin?)

I feel like Apple was double-dared into developing Vision Pro.

Back when there was a weird collective craze for VR: Oculus Rift, Ready Player One, Nintendo, Facebook paying $2B... "WTF is going on?" asks Apple.

Imagine then having spent years and billions of your R&D budget only to watch the whole VR craze go the way of the Pet Rock.

Still, you kinda have to show something for all that R&D.

iPod was the Next Big Thing, iPhone was the Next Big Thing. This VR headset is not.

Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling.

For the ‘clunky’ I think they’re just betting on Moore’s law (in some interpretation) keeping up and batteries getting more powerful in the next few years, so that they can shrink the device and its production costs.

IMO, that is a safe bet for batteries, a bit less so for the electronics and even less so for the mechanical parts.

And what’s considered ugly can change fairly fast, if the device turns out to be useful/entertaining (which it IMO will be) enough to warrant its sales price (that, I’m not certain of.

Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling.

Apple is a master at having the users pay for R&D. They didn't go and raise millions to billions of dollars in venture capital... they started with phones using cheap Samsung SoCs and from there on, they evolved rapidly, with their M-series SoCs now being on par with Intel performance-wise.

The hipsters pay outrageous amounts of money for Apple hardware - me being amongst them - and Apple doesn't go and waste all their income on stock buybacks or luxurious dividends, but invests it into developing technology to legitimately drive the state of the art forward.

ARM Macs and T2 Macs aren't really at all architecturally similar and I don't think it helped any. It was probably a distraction.

Do you have any further reading to provide about what all the T2 was doing in those Macs? I too have long suspected that the T2 was Apple playing with transition right in front of us, but would love a more comprehensive look at what all that chip was doing.

I know it was providing the Secure Enclave, some hardware encode/decode media blocks, and I think FileVault for the SSD. But would be curious to know if it was even more than that.

Apple ships and has shipped ARMs in everything. Dozens of them.

If I had to pick an ancestor it would just be A-series chips in iPhones and iPads.

Edit: I remembered it wrong. It was LG Prada that came before iPhone - that's the reason why iPhone did not feel completely novel at the time. iPod Touch was released few months later and was very similar to iPhone minus the cellular connection - a logical cheaper followup to the iPhone.

Why not both? It’s iterative improvement, but also combining bits and pieces.

It doesn't say "available for purchase." It says "will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities."

Waymo is already there, in at least 2 cities but not all weather conditions. Expanding to 10 cities and all weather conditions in the next 6 years sounds more than plausible.

I had sided with Atwood (skeptic) but now it seems like Carmack "has already won".

"Against" is a pretty clear winner at this point.

You seem very confident that "against" will win after only two years have elapsed since the bet was made, when there are still EIGHT YEARS of time remaining on the bet.

The hell are you talking about. Waymo is already there.

"Passenger use" is the bet -- not purchase.

Carmack is not a poor man, so a $10k bet or two (for charity, mind you) is more of a friendly wager than a make/break gamble.

And he's clearly been optimistic most his life, and it's paid off a number of times.

And self-driving has progressed further and faster than I have thought it would, though I don't think we'll get Level 5 by 2030.

I am a self driving skeptic but seems like a good bet for Carmack. I would expect Waymo to open up to consumers before 2030 in SF, even if more expensive and take way longer than a normal car. It could be little more than a tech demo and he would still win the bet.

Disagree. Waymo is currently at level 3. From your link, emergency responders have the ability to put the car in a manual mode to get it out of the way if it is stuck. Waymo also has employees make decisions on behalf of the car remotely when it finds itself in a tricky situation.

Level 5 fully autonomous would mean the car is able to drive in icy and snowy conditions (adjusting how it drives based on traction), it would be able to respond to verbal commands from construction workers, and it would be able to detect when a hazard in the road prevents it from continuing, plan a new route, and detour.

There isn't much incentive for Waymo or its competitors to create level 5 autonomous cars when there is a plenty large market in places where there is good weather and good signal for an employee to tell the car what to do if necessary.

There's a big leap to go from geofenced Phoenix to NYC

Waymo is not going to be working everywhere in the US in all conditions by 2030 (and it doesn't need to, either).

AFAIK, that's what L5 means.

Is anyone at Level 5, though? At all? In even a prototype?

Standard roads are probably the intent. Being pedantic is just moving goalposts.

except in the case of natural disasters or emergencies

Whatever a human driver with a non-commerical license does on a day to day basis is a good measuring stick.

The text of the official standard explicitly mentions floods, defining Level 5 to be when the software "can operate the vehicle on-road anywhere within its region of the world and under all road conditions in which a conventional vehicle can be reasonably operated by a typically skilled human driver"

It adds: "However, there may be conditions not manageable by a driver in which the ADS would also be unable to complete a given trip (e.g., white-out snow storm, flooded roads, glare ice, etc.) until or unless the adverse conditions clear. At the onset of such unmanageable conditions the ADS would perform the DDT fallback to achieve a minimal risk condition (e.g., by pulling over to the side of the road and waiting for the conditions to change)."

It means that it needs to be able to get the vehicle into a safe situation regardless of conditions. That can mean needing human help once it is there in some cases.

This doesn't mean that it needs to magically cross destroyed bridges, as the popular culture definition often implies.

Waymo is level 4. SAE calls out “local driverless taxi” as an example of level 4.

https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update

Isn't GM ditching phone connectivity in favor of Google Built In (TM)? e.g. they're fine with Google building it if they can upcharge for it.

They may hate it, but consumers really want it (CarPlay at least). The car market is fairly competitive and Apple customers pay fairly well ...

They’re exactly why I switched away from GM this year. I get wanting your own UI but not at least allowing CarPlay and android auto is very telling in the current market and I like getting updates and seamless handoff and/or continuity between the phone and the car.

The last thing I want is my car, with how I use it, stuck on multi year old tech that the car company won’t update and because it’s proprietary you can’t update it either. “Oh sorry the Spotify app we pre installed can’t use any of the new features they released last year. No we don’t plan to update it.”

Car companies are notoriously terrible with software.

We’ll see how this plays out, but historically car companies’ tech has been the absolute worst.

I would MUCH rather see software in a car from one of the major tech companies if they insist. Personally, I would be happy with a tablet mount, Bluetooth audio, and physical buttons for the rest.

I would trust a tech company with self driving far more if the software on those media abominations is any indicator.

So far everyone I’ve talked to agrees that this is a stupid move. Anecdotal evidence, I know. But I feel like it’s obvious that not offering features isn’t a winning strategy

Thats how the rest of the car is built though. You don’t get a honda, you get a laundry list of component vendors you’ve probably never heard of on a contract to make parts along with a honda badge, vendors who go on to make all the competitors cars out of these same supply lines too.

OK, but none of those companies are going to be differentiating themselves by making their own silicon. and probably not their own self driving software from the looks of things.

GM sure is succeeding in differentiating their product. By removing the one infotainment system feature I actually want, they have guaranteed I will never buy one of their cars.

GM's move isn't about differentiation, it's about more money (no, differentiation alone doesn't == more money). They think they can charge for subscriptions. (They are delusional.)

Maybe this is why GM ditched it. Maybe they talked to Apple and Apple wanted their subscription money and GM thought, Hmmm, we could do that, f* Apple.

Apple cares about the end-to-end user experience too much to do this. Likely the car will have Apple's software sauce and design, be branded an Apple vehicle but be manufactured by BMW, VW group, or a Chinese manufacturer (Volvo/Polestar etc.)

That's the point. They would control the end user experience, dictating it to the manufacturers.

You don't want your phone driving your car at any circumstances.

What are they? Self-driving cars on the street is not a goal to me. What problem does that solve?

I literally took a waymo this morning. What are you talking about

I agree, and this also applies to basically every venture capitalist backed venture these days. They are effectively pump and dump schemes.

Wow the cynicism. Waymo is successfully providing self driving rides TODAY. Tesla is actively trying to leverage their lean manufacturing prowess to provide this service en masse via FSD.

Yep because them and their ilk created the issue now you need to buy their solution. Meanwhile your bog standard no frills 2010s era car would be like a hardened CIA ghost vehicle in comparison to anything offered from an american tech company, even a model pitched specifically for privacy.

Or maybe "without privacy problems," the way the industry is going?

That is also a very reasonable hypothesis. It would be interesting to know the economics in this case, if that turned out to be true. Spinning up an entire automotive engineering R&D division seems like a very expensive way to generate patents.

Is it? Wikipedia[1] puts Porshe's Operating margins at loosely 16%. Which isn't bad for auto probably but isn't great for tech.

Why not both? You buy the car, and you pay a recurring subscription fee for the service.

It's result of a technical fight between the archive website and some hosting services, discussed a few times in other HN threads. Here's the Wayback Machine version which may work.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240123184535/https://www.bloom...

If you're using firefox, whitelist the archive URL in your DNS-over-HTTPS settings.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-dns-over-https

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...

To read text-only:

   #!/bin/sh
   x=$(echo x|tr x '\34');
   grep -Eo '("value":"[^"]+)|("type":"paragraph")|("type":"br")' \
   |sed "
    s/\"type\":\"paragraph\"/$x$x/g;
    s/\"type\":\"br\"/$x$x/g;
    s/.\{9\}//;
    s/’/\'/g;
    s/—/-/g;
    s/̶[01];/\"/g;
   " \
   |tr -d '\12' \
   |tr '\34' '\12' \
   |fmt

    busybox wget -O 1.htmljson https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-23/apple-car-ev-set-to-debut-in-2028-with-limited-autonomous-driving 
    1.sh < 1.htmljson > 1.txt
    less 1.txt

Yeah I think this holds true there as well. It's a small, niche market, but it's hard to argue what they are doing isn't leaps and bounds ahead of anything from Meta (Ignoring the price differences).

I would say they generally set up to corner the market in 2-3 generations.

First iPhone, first iPod.. didn't quite take over the market, but it was a quick path from there to being dominating 3 iterations down the line.

I don't think this is realistic for cars though. It doesn't feel like a good idea to me, but who knows..

Oops... I rewrote the start of that sentence, but not the end...

It's interesting how, from my average man perspective, it's impossible to say whether a company operating at the scale of Apple is or is not victim to the sunk cost fallacy.

On one hand, a push to deliver can be leadership setting a sink-or-swim deadline to avoid sunk costs. On the other hand, maybe they've already gone too far down a dead end.

I think it has to be tricky because a tech company that does manufacturing at Apple's scale is kind of obligated to explore these possibilities. But how can you or I calculate what constraints should be in place so exploration can be effective while avoiding waste?

They're quite similar projects from software / AI standpoint. Anyone who is hired for autonomous cars can be assigned on a robot team. An autonomous car is also kind of a robot. Aside from this, I just think that a humanoid robot is a product that Apple is destined to make. A car doesn't make sense to me.

Kind of sounds like an enterprise deal and Apple can keep selling hardware/services to funded governments and corporations?