Apple Car: NYT, PAIL, and DF
Thoughts on Apple Car, Part 83
The New York Times is out with a new report on Project Titan, citing five people from behind the scenes:
Besides the scoop that Apple Car prototypes will be sent to commute employees from Palo Alto to Infinite Loop (which makes sense), the report had three tidbits that are interesting:
1. Doors are key for Apple Car
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.
I argued throughout my series of articles here on Medium that entering and exiting Apple Car would be central to the overall experience, much different to how we enter and exit cars today.
Looking at other places where Apple ID is experimenting with door design, here’s what you’ll find:
2. Project Titan helps augment reality
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.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball picked this up and said:
Think about the way that ARKit is focused on identifying flat surfaces like floors and table tops. Seems like exactly the sort of thing that might have first been focused on identifying, say, roads. There’s no car yet, and there may never be, but I would bet there’s good stuff coming out of Project Titan already.
I bet there are a number of initiatives that Apple is running now, that prepare us for Apple Car: ARkit, the iPhone Upgrade Program, HomePod, or Liam.
3. Apple will design the whole car
The NYT:
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.
Testing this design direction makes sense, even more so since Apple hired Florian Hoenig from Audi who created the vehicle we saw in Minority Report – with spheres instead of wheels:
And, the ambition is to reimagine the whole thing:
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.
So, contrary to the NYT’s headline, Apple is not scaling back, but rather going the direction of Jony’s vision:
Apple’s ambition know no boundaries, as Neil Cybart once put it.
