Autonomous driving has been lowered to Level 2
”
Author: Wang Lei, Truman
Edited by Qin Zhangyong
Ten years after building a car, Apple Car is going to bow to reality!
According to the latest foreign media reports, in order to make the car project land as soon as possible, Apple had to adjust its R&D strategy and goals, and shifted to goals that are more achievable and very unsexy.
The first is to postpone the target launch date of electric vehicles, from the official launch of electric vehicles as early as 2026 to the official launch of electric vehicles in 2028 at the earliest.
The most critical thing is that Apple has also lowered the level of intelligent driving of this car, from L4 to L2+.
This made the Apple Car, which the majority of "fruit fans" were waiting for, fall off the altar again.
Since 2014, Apple's project codenamed Project Titan was exposed, the outside world has taken out 200% expectations for Apple's car, and Apple was also full of confidence at that time to build a self-driving car in the true sense of the word, reaching the level of L5 autonomous driving.
But the reality is very skinny, and the Titan project can be described as full of twists and turns. For a long time, there have been leadership turmoil, strategic shifts and other obstacles, and delivery targets have been repeatedly delayed.
Xiaomi cars are already planning to be delivered, the Apple car is still in the laboratory, and now it can't even get a prototype.
01
Downgrade L2+
"Either the delivery is finalized or the project is cancelled altogether. ”
This is the latest directive given by Kevin Lynch, Apple's head of the car-building project, and CEO Tim Cook after a series of meetings.
This decision makes Apple Car set the key node of life and death in 2028.
The news was revealed by Mark Gurman, a technology reporter at Bloomberg and a well-known Apple whistleblower, and it is quite credible.
Gurman said that although Apple has high expectations for the car project, with the initial goal of designing a driverless car with fully autonomous functions, there are many challenges in the process of advancing in reality.
After discovering that it was not possible to complete a fully self-driving car in the foreseeable future, Apple began to turn to the next best thing, developing an electric car with relatively few features, that is, developing less automated driver assistance features, and Gurman also specifically mentioned Tesla, saying that the Apple car may be on par with Tesla's current level.
This also means that the Apple car, which is likely to be released in four years, will use L2+ technology, instead of the originally planned L4, not to mention the L5 level of autonomous driving that was initially set.
Not to mention what level it can reach, the pure electric car in the domestic market, L2+ can be said to be the basic threshold, and Huawei next door will already be able to reach L2.9999 in 2023...
Apple's L2+ car will wait until 2028, two years later than the previously expected 2026.
2028 is a key watershed year for the Apple Car project, and if an electric vehicle with this capability isn't available in 2028, Apple executives may "seriously reconsider the existence of the project."
Even with a new strategy with lowered targets, some Apple executives remain skeptical that the Apple car will be able to achieve the same margins as the iPhone.
In other words, Apple makes cars in-house, which is a thankless type.
However, suspicion is doubt, Gurman said that Apple will still move forward according to the new plan, and will make a new round of personnel changes to the hardware department and the autonomous driving team.
This is not surprising, as back in September last year, well-known analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that AppleCar's development now seems to have lost all visibility. If Apple doesn't take acquisitions as the best strategy to enter the car market, "I doubt that the Apple car will be mass-produced in the next few years." ”
Now it's a prophecy.
02
5 people in charge in 10 years, but not a single car was built
A full 10 years have passed since the Titan Project was exposed, and Apple Car is still nowhere to be seen.
At the beginning of July 2022, foreign media The Information published an in-depth report entitled "Apple's Eight Years of Efforts to Build Self-Driving Cars", which believes that the biggest challenge facing Apple is Apple's decision to develop its own automotive engineering road and related content, rather than using the experience accumulated by car companies over the past century.
In other words, Apple is a little overconfident.
Looking back at Apple's car-making road, you will find that the development route of the Titan project has changed again and again.
Apple originally intended to start with an improved driving experience, when Apple and Magna worked together to build an initial prototype that looked like a minivan, and Apple envisioned how to make the car detect a heart attack and take them to the hospital. Or provide surround sound and noise cancellation technology to ensure that every passenger in the same car can listen to different music.
However, before this was realized, Apple turned to research autonomous driving, and even spent $125 million to buy a test site in order to facilitate testing.
But it didn't take long for Apple's design team to start adjusting the direction of car building to the actual car landing. It can be said that in the past 10 years, the direction of Apple's car manufacturing has been constantly swinging, from driving experience, to the landing of real cars, to autonomous driving, constantly overturning and restarting.
In the past few years, the Titan team has frequently reported the news of disbandment, and senior executives have left and jumped ship.
According to incomplete statistics, Apple's car-making project has changed 5 people in charge.
According to public information, the latest person in charge of the current Titan project is Kevin Lynch, Apple's vice president in charge of technology, who is also one of the designers of the Apple Watch.
Prior to joining Apple, Lynch was the chief technology officer of Adobe and also worked in software development at Macromedia, which was later acquired by Adobe for $3.4 billion.
Before Lynch took over the Titan project, the previous head was Doug Field, unlike Lynch, Doug had experience working in the automotive industry, and before he was in charge of Apple's car manufacturing project, he was a senior executive at Tesla, responsible for the mass production of the Model 3.
However, he also failed to lead Apple in building a prototype, and in September 2021, Doug Field abruptly announced his departure and moved to Ford, where he headed the electric vehicle division and served as chief director of advanced technology and embedded systems.
It is reported that the reason for Doug's resignation is that he does not believe that Apple's top management will officially approve the release of a car, and after Doug's departure, Kevin Lynch took over, and proposed a new research and development direction: a fully autonomous car that cancels the steering wheel and pedals.
In 2014, the Apple Car project was launched under the leadership of Steve Zadesky, a former Ford engineer who was the director of the iPhone and iPod. Later, it was replaced by Dan Riccio, the former head of the hardware department, and then the leadership came to Bob Mansfield.
In the past 10 years, the Titan project has experienced 5 leaders, and once a son of heaven and a courtier, Apple's car-making plan has changed and changed.
In addition to the frequent change of leaders, the turnover of technical executives, engineers, and specific business leaders is also very fast.
The wave of departures from the Apple Car team began in 2021, with Doug moving to Ford, and Michael Schwekutsch, senior director of engineering, SPG, and head of hardware projects, also choosing to leave to develop a flying taxi.
Although Apple has not publicly invested in car manufacturing, many industry bigwigs have been poached by Apple. In May 2022, Bloomberg reported that the Apple car team poached Desi Ujkashevic, an executive who has been with Ford for more than 30 years, in an effort to accelerate the work on electric vehicles.
Two months later, Luigi Taraborrelli, a top automotive R&D manager who has worked at Lamborghini for 20 years, was revealed to be leading Apple in the design of future cars.
03
Is it still too late in 2028?
Xiaomi took 1,001 days to build a car, while Apple waited until 2028, which took 14 years.
Time is very precious for new energy vehicle companies, and it can be said that every second counts.
"Wei Xiaoli", the three new power car companies, was basically established around 2015, which is similar to the timeline of Apple's car, but in the past 10 years, "Wei Xiaoli" has achieved the landing from concept to mass production and delivery, and has crossed several life and death lines, and has begun to take shape in the market.
Over the past decade, the automotive industry has undergone multiple rounds of reshuffle, with increasingly fierce competition, increasingly fierce price wars, and bankrupt players falling one after another.
During this period, Apple's biggest achievement is estimated to be Car Play.
Apple Car will only meet us in 2028, if there is not enough innovation and competitiveness, I am afraid that the daylily will be cold. After all, there are not a few players who make cross-border cars now, Xiaomi's first car Xiaomi SU7 is about to be launched this year, and Apple's big move that has been held back for so many years has been cut off.
According to Gurman's revelations, the Apple car four years later was developed with reference to Tesla's current level.
You must know that today's new energy vehicle market is changing with each passing day, and after it is rolled to a certain extent, the changes in one year are already the difference between heaven and earth. Apple's wave of operations is a perfect interpretation of "backwardness when released".
It is worth mentioning that Tesla recently pushed the latest FSD Beta v12.1.2 to North American car owners, training an end-to-end neural network with massive video data, replacing the original more than 300,000 lines of C++ code.
There are still 4 years to go until 2028, and no one can predict how far the market will be involved at that time, but for the newborn Apple car, it must be hellish of difficulty.