The Information publication shared detailed information about the development of an unmanned vehicle Apple Car.
It turned out that things were not going as smoothly as expected. The company has some problems with placement, with top managers.
Problems with children
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, tests the skepticism of the Apple Titan project. He does not participate in the takeover, but does not participate in the discussion of his responsibility for other leaders.
Tim Cook only oversees the project remotely and “rarely visits” the Santa Clara, California offices. Some employees were told that such a manual lacked “a single form that can clearly define and articulate what the product should be.” He doesn’t want to commit to the overall design concept.
Against this background, there were reshuffles in the company. So, Ian Goodfellow started developing machine learning for Apple’s self-driving cars, but he started work earlier this year.
Doug Field took over the Titan project from Bob Mansfield in 2018, who is doing “very hard work” for the Apple Car. Some employees said that his lead was “the best thing ever to come out with a car”. Field then announced his departure in September 2021, lured over by Ford.
Jony Ive and design
To date, Kevin Lynch has concluded that the Apple Car. The goal is to mass-produce cars for consumers.
Apple employees are now looking at how to disguise a new version of the self-driving test car, which looks more like the final version of the car Apple wants to measure, and could be on the road as early as next year. The vehicle on offer is codenamed M101, an M-based designation that Apple has assigned a codename to a “product” it can sell. Not only technologies are used in it.
– Information
Former Apple head of design Jony Ive was also involved in development through his company LoveFrom. He observed the Apple Car to “feel the strangeness” of the car’s design and “not souls with covered sensors.”
The car’s current design is said to be “four seats, grabber grips to make passengers feel each other, and have a curved ceiling similar to the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle.”
Apple Car designers are also experimenting with a trunk that automatically raises and is used to limit owners’ “easy access to storage space.” The team also discussed “large screens that rise from behind the seats and lower when they’re not moving”, as well as a design that allows passengers to “lay flat and sit in the car”.
Apple wants to use the US Highway Traffic Safety Administration. control steering wheel or brake pedalto fully entrust the control of the autopilot system.
The team also took Cook for a ride in a test vehicle in the Santa Clara Valley. The car ended on its own without any incidents of its own and even “ran the DMV driving test autonomously to calculate the probability.”
But not everything is so good. After a while, failures appeared. Among the two people working on the powerful ones, Apple test vehicles that are modified with Lexus SUVs are showing up on the streets near Silicon Valley headquarters without maps, hitting curbs and sometimes finding it difficult to stay in their lanes when crossing intersections. .
The jogger incident
Ranking this year, one of Apple’s test vehicles almost crashed into a jogger while passing by at about 15 minutes per hour. The car’s software “first identified the runner as a stationary object”, then before reclassifying it as a “stationary person”, and finally a “moving pedestrian”.
But note: “just slightly adjusted my path”. The alternate driver then “slammed the brakes at the last moment” and the car “stopped a few meters from the pedestrian”. Had no human intervened, Apple’s tests observed that the car “almost would surely run into a runner“.
Apple temporarily paused testing and fixed an identification issue while investigating the crosswalk system. [9to5]
Source: Iphones RU
