Apple Car
Apple is set to shake up the automotive world by launching an autonomous electric car over the next few years.
Apple Car – As far as we know
Not much has been confirmed about the legendary Apple Car beyond a full-scale automotive project. As usual, the iPhone maker is as mysterious as it gets, but too much has been reported on settings, offerings, and other developments for your automated work to be purely experimental. Here’s what you need to know to get familiar with the Apple car:
What is the Apple car?
In essence, we know that Apple Car is a type of electric vehicle (EV). All the rumors point in this direction and the gasoline would make no sense for a company using green credentials. When it hits the road, gasoline will likely look back, especially in Apple’s home state of California, where wildfires only intensify with global warming.
According to sources such as the Apple Insider Project, the Apple Car Project is internally called Titan. It is also believed to be a completely Apple-designed vehicle, although Bloomberg says the company pressed a reset button in 2016, laid off dozens of workers and temporarily reduced work to a stand-alone platform. Since then, the company is believed to have stepped up the Apple Car Support project.
Another sure thing is that it will have LiDAR-based autonomous driving capabilities. related trade secrets, Wired reported. In August of the same year, a test vehicle was rebuilt on a public road (Engadget). In June 2019, Apple bought a startup called Drive.ai.
The degree of autonomy with which an Apple Car could arrive on the market is unknown. While companies like Waymo have fully autonomous taxis, they only operate in limited markets, and there is a big step forward towards personal transportation that goes anywhere. And due to technical hurdles, Apple could be forced to adopt something closer to the semi-autonomous technology that Tesla currently has, enough to handle streets and parking lots, but not the most complex scenarios.
Patent applications uncovered by sites like Business Insider have sometimes pointed to features that may or may not turn into an actual product. These include “virtual” windows that can be seen through a helmet or airbag walls that can avoid objects. However, many Apple patents have gone nowhere, and the company will likely stick to the features it can offer at an acceptable price. The New York Times says Apple hired a company called Torc Robotics to install two Lexus SUVs with sensors.
In 2016, titanium was an open secret, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk told the BBC that “it’s pretty hard to hide something when you hire over a thousand engineers to do it. “. The company is even said to be investigating charging stations (Reuters), but this year saw the aforementioned upheaval that changed leadership, laid off dozens of people and temporarily shifted its focus to a stand-alone platform.
Things got back on track in 2017 when the company received approval to test autonomous driving technology on the streets of California (The Verge) and appeared to lease a test site in Arizona (Jalopnik). the viability of an autonomous car and the ultimate alignment of Titan (Bloomberg).
Obviously, something has gotten the green light. As of January 2018, Apple had registered 27 autonomous test vehicles in California and reportedly worked with Volkswagen to build an autonomous shuttle for its employees (New York Times). Vehicles continued to grow and 2018 saw not only Apple’s first car crash, but also trade secrets stolen from a former employee (Wired).
Things apparently remained static in 2019 and 2020 despite Apple’s dismissal of 200 Pe