Apple has reportedly set a 2025 deadline for its driverless electric vehicle, with a reinforced approach focusing on self-driving capabilities. Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter.
The push to accelerate the Apple car project came after a period of recess that saw the smartphone maker suspend work on the project. Now, the Cupertino giant is revitalizing the electric vehicle project, aiming to develop fast and reliable technicalities to meet the deadline.
The focus had been two key areas; to create a model with limited self-driving capabilities focused on steering and acceleration — similar to many current cars — or a version with full self-driving ability that doesn’t require human intervention.
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Now, the company is focusing on the second option of the two key areas of engineering. Kevin Lynch, Apple Watch software executive, is pushing for a car with a full self-driving system in the first version, the report says, citing the people who spoke on anonymity.
“It’s just the latest shift for the car effort, known as the Special Projects Group or “Project Titan,” which has endured strategy changes and executive turnover since starting around 2014. In September, the former head of the team, Doug Field, left for a job at Ford Motor Co. after three years in charge. In picking Lynch as his replacement, Apple went with an internal executive who isn’t a car veteran,” the report says.
Apple intensified the push to develop its own car late last year, and has made big moves, including reaching out to traditional automakers like Hyundai, to kick off the project.
The report says Apple is internally targeting a launch of its self-driving car in four years, faster than the five- to seven-year timeline that some engineers had been planning for earlier this year.
The push however, has come with a huge technical challenge that the company is rallying around experts to solve.
Apple is hiring more self-driving and car hardware engineers, targeting people like CJ Moore, Tesla’s former self-driving software director.
“In recent weeks, Apple has also tapped a climate system expert from Volvo Car AB, a manager from Daimler Trucks, battery systems engineers from Karma Automotive LLC and other carmakers, a sensor engineer from General Motors Co.’s Cruise LLC, automotive safety engineers from companies like Joyson Safety Systems, and multiple other engineers from Tesla, according to information from LinkedIn and people with knowledge of the matter,” the report says.
However, the timing presents another major challenge that makes ambition a probable thing. Pulling off the huge software engineering task involved in building the type of electric driverless car that Apple wants, takes time.
As Bloomberg noted, the world leading electric vehicle maker, Tesla Inc., is still battling to get the self-driving technology right, and it may probably take more years. Alphabet’s Waymo has wobbled through the years amidst departures that have jeopardized its efforts to develop the technology. And Uber agreed to sell off its autonomous-driving division last year.
Apple has design specifications that make the needed technology complex. The company’s ideal car would have no steering wheel and pedals, and its interior would be designed around hands-off driving.
“Apple has also explored designs where the car’s infotainment system — likely a large iPad-like touch screen — would be in the middle of the vehicle, letting users interact with it throughout a ride. The car would also be heavily integrated with Apple’s existing services and devices. Though the company is pushing to not have a standard steering wheel, Apple has discussed equipping the car with an emergency takeover mode,” Bloomberg said.
While Apple has scored high level success in some key areas, including in developing the car’s underlying self-driving system, according to the people familiar with the workings, major works remain, and would take sufficient time that may likely amount to years.
The core component of the Project Titan is the chip, which was designed by Apple’s silicon engineering group. Apple believes it has completed much of the core work on the processor it intends to eventually ship in the first generation of the car.
“The advancements could soon make their way into road tests. Apple plans to start using the new processor design and updated self-driving sensors in retrofitted cars that it’s spent years testing in California,” says the report. The company currently has a fleet of 69 Lexus SUVs experimenting with its technology, according to the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles.
Apple’s push to develop a self-driving car by 2025 is driven by the desire to provide consumers with a technology that will spare them from driving fatigue when they’re on long trips.
But despite the milestones reached so far, Apple still has a mammoth of challenges to confront. Safety is a major part of it. With existing self-driving engineering like Tesla’s, still being hounded by errors resulting in crashes, the need to develop a technology that can be trusted is more important than meeting the four years deadline. Apple is tackling the challenge by creating plenty of redundancy — the ability for layers of backup systems to kick in to avoid safety and driving system failures.
However, the recent progress has not killed the skepticism, even among those who are part of the Project Titans, that Apple’s goal is aggressive and may not likely be attained in 2025.