Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car
Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car
By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI AUG. 22, 2017
SAN FRANCISCO — As new employees were brought into
Apple’s secret effort to create a self-driving car a few years ago, managers
told them that they were working on the company’s next big thing: A product
that would take on Detroit and disrupt the automobile industry.
These days, Apple’s automotive ambitions are more modest.
The company has put off any notion of an Apple-branded autonomous vehicle and
is instead working on the underlying technology that allows a car to drive
itself. Timothy D. Cook, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview
with Bloomberg in June that Apple is “focusing on autonomous systems.”
A notable symbol of that retrenchment is a self-driving
shuttle service that ferries employees from one Apple building to another. The
shuttle, which has never been reported before, will likely be a commercial
vehicle from an automaker and Apple will use it to test the autonomous driving
technology that it develops.
Five people familiar with Apple’s car project, code-named
“Titan,” discussed with The New York Times the missteps that led the tech giant
to move — at least for now — from creating a self-driving Apple car to creating
technology for a car that someone else builds. They spoke on the condition of
anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about Apple’s
plans.
The project’s reduced scale aligns Apple more closely
with other tech companies that are working on autonomous driving technology but
are steering clear of building cars. Even Waymo, the Google self-driving
spinoff that is probably furthest along among Silicon Valley companies, has
said repeatedly that it does not plan to produce its own vehicles.
Apple’s testing vehicles will carry employees between its
various Silicon Valley offices. The new effort is called PAIL, short for Palo
Alto to Infinite Loop, the address of the company’s main office in Cupertino,
Calif., and a few miles down the road from Palo Alto, Calif.
Apple’s in-house shuttle service, which isn’t operational
yet, follows Waymo, Uber and a number of car companies that have been testing
driverless cars on city streets around the world.
Apple has a history of tinkering with a technology until
its engineers figure out what to do with it. The company worked on touch
screens for years, for example, before that technology became an essential part
of the iPhone.
But the initial scale of Apple’s driverless ambitions
went beyond tinkering or building underlying technology. The Titan project
started in 2014, and it was staffed by many Apple veterans. The company also
hired engineers with expertise in building cars, and not just the software that
would run an autonomous vehicle.
It was a do-it-all approach typical of Apple, which
prefers to control every aspect of a product, from the software that runs it to
the look and feel of the hardware.
From the beginning, the employees dedicated to Project
Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that
opened and closed silently. They also studied ways to redesign a car interior
without a steering wheel or gas pedals, and they worked on adding virtual or
augmented reality into interior displays.
The team also worked on a new light and ranging detection
sensor, also known as lidar. Lidar sensors normally protrude from the top of a
car like a spinning cone and are essential in driverless cars. Apple, as always
focused on clean designs, wanted to do away with the awkward cone.
Apple even looked into reinventing the wheel. A team
within Titan investigated the possibility of using spherical wheels — round
like a globe — instead of the traditional, round ones, because spherical wheels
could allow the car better lateral movement.
But the car project ran into trouble, said the five
people familiar with it, dogged by its size and by the lack of a clearly
defined vision of what Apple wanted in a vehicle. Team members complained of
shifting priorities and arbitrary or unrealistic deadlines.
There was disagreement about whether Apple should develop
a fully autonomous vehicle or a semiautonomous car that could drive itself for
stretches but allow the driver to retake control.
Steve Zadesky, an Apple executive who was initially in
charge of Titan, wanted to pursue the semiautonomous option. But people within
the industrial design team including Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer,
believed that a fully driverless car would allow the company to reimagine the
automobile experience, according to the five people.
A similar debate raged inside Google’s self-driving car
effort for years. There, the fully autonomous vehicle won out, mainly because
researchers worried drivers couldn’t be trusted to retake control in an
emergency.
Even though Apple had not ironed out many of the basics,
like how the autonomous systems would work, a team had already started working
on an operating system software called CarOS. There was fierce debate about
whether it should be programmed using Swift, Apple’s own programming language,
or the industry standard, C++.
Mr. Zadesky, who worked on the iPod and iPhone, eventually
left Titan and took a leave of absence from the company for personal reasons in
2016. He is still at Apple, although he is no longer involved in the project.
Mr. Zadesky could not be reached for comment.
Last year, Apple started to rein in the project. The
company tapped Bob Mansfield, a longtime executive who over the years had led
hardware engineering for some of Apple’s most successful products, to oversee
Titan.
Mr. Mansfield shelved plans to build a car and focused
the project on the underlying self-driving technology. He also laid off some
hardware staff, though the exact number of employees dedicated to working on
car technology was unclear.
More recently, the team has grown again, adding personnel
with expertise in autonomous systems, rather than car production.
Apple’s headlong foray into autonomous vehicles
underscores one of the biggest challenges facing the company: finding the next
breakthrough product. As Apple celebrates the iPhone’s 10th anniversary, the
company remains heavily dependent on smartphone sales for growth. It has
introduced new products like the Apple Watch and expanded revenue from
services, but the iPhone still accounts for more than half of its sales.
In April, the California Department of Motor Vehicles
granted Apple a test permit to allow the company to test autonomous driving
technology in three 2015 Lexus RX 450h sport utility vehicles. There will be a
safety driver monitoring the car during testing.
While many companies are pursuing driverless technology
and see it as a game changer for car ownership and transportation, no one has
figured out how to cash in yet.
With expectations reset and the team more focused, people
on the Titan project said morale has improved under Mr. Mansfield. Still, one
of the biggest challenges is holding onto talented engineers because
self-driving technology is one of the hottest things in Silicon Valley, and
Apple is hardly the only company working on it.
Follow Daisuke Wakabayashi on Twitter @daiwaka
A version of this article appears in print on August 23,
2017, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Apple Shifts Plan
for Car To a Shuttle For Workers.
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