Apple is aggressively ramping up its testing of autonomous vehicles, more than tripling its fleet in just the past year.
Trisha Thadani and Emmanuel Martinez for The Washington Post:
A few miles from Apple’s headquarters here, a gold SUV carrying a large, boxy sensor on its roof crossed a four-way intersection this summer and hung a left just like any other car on the street.
But that car was one of 67 vehicles outfitted with autonomous capabilities that the highly secretive company can test in California, public records show, a number that more than tripled in scale over the past year.
The sharp rise in the miles tested on California’s roads suggest that Apple has been quietly ramping up its autonomous ambitions. Records show its cars were tested over 450,000 miles in California between December 2022 and November 2023 — more than tripling from the year before, and the biggest jump among companies with the most testing in the state…
A total of 38 companies have received permits to test in California, according to the DMV. Waymo, Amazon-owned Zoox, General Motors-owned Cruise, Apple and Nuro were among the companies that totaled the greatest number of miles for their autonomous vehicles last year, according to the data. Waymo, which is owned by Google, totaled more than 4.8 million miles in 2023.
The next closest company, Cruise, had more than 2.6 million miles, while Zoox registered more than 700,000.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple autonomous vehicle testing increased the most of any company between 2022 and 2023 – 262% – but all of Apple’s testing came from vehicles with a safety driver while companies like Waymo, Zook, Cruise, and Nuro compiled mileage with and without safety drivers.
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I don’t want to ride in a car designed by a company that designed Siri.
Or that can’t figure out that the keyboard backlight does not need to get brighter as the light in the room gets brighter.
Does aggressively ramping up mean something like AI road rage?
I wanted to rebuttal you Sam… but I can’t.
Who asked for this? My car…I’m driving!
I’d probably trust a computer (eventually) over other drivers.
Will the charging port be underneath the car?
I’d love to hear the backstory on how Apple shifted from working hard on Apple TV to trying to build a car. Steve Jobs was enthusiastic into wanting to doing to TV what iTunes did for music. On the surface, that passion seems to have died with Steve. Whose idea was the car? Steve’s? Jonny Ives, Tim Cook? Other? It would be interesting to know how all this evolved and changed over the past 12 years.