Yesterday, an important event occurred in the world of electronics and gadgets, namely, Apple announced the cessation of development of its own electric car. Fans from the apple sect will not see a new and wonderful toy. In this news there are two interesting items for thought …
Ten years of painstaking work, tens of billions of dollars, it all went to hell. And now a team of more than 2,000 people will change their way of life. Some will be thrown out on the street, and some will go to the AI development department.
Apple could not make its own electric car – sounds very funny. So Elon Musk could, many car manufacturers could, I’m the guys from Cupertino no? The problem is actually in another. This car was planned to be fully autonomous and had to be controlled by voice. Apple has changed the leaders of this direction several times in ten years, and lowered the threshold of difficulty. If previously planned autopilot 4th level, then the difficulty was reduced to 2nd level. But it is not possible to master it.
Another snag that according to preliminary calculations, the cost of the future of iCar was supposed to start from 100 thousand. bucks. The chances of this car being mass-produced are minimal, which means the investment never pays off.
On the other hand, Cupertino employs very smart guys, and they know how to squeeze people absolutely unnecessary things, and at an inflated price. Perhaps they could play on the feelings of their fans and ensure the sale of the future electric car. Why not? But let us look at the problem from another perspective.
The decision to close the iCar development program was made after some problems related to the maintenance of electric vehicles began to surface. We discussed them in this magazine. Is this and cold season service, the drop in the value of used electric vehicles, and the danger of software failure such gadgets on wheels? Again, the guys at Cupertino aren’t stupid, so maybe they figured out that electric cars don’t have a bright future, and that’s why they shut down their program?
And the second curious point. The main failure to develop iCar is the failure to develop an autopilot system, or in other words an artificial intelligence that should drive a car! There is no such system today that guaranteed the safe management of cars without the participation of a person. Maybe in the future it will appear, and maybe not. But many companies are creating whole departments to develop this very AI, which implies the development of new tens of billions of dollars. So think…
