Apple car wild speculation thread

I don’t know, I just don’t think we’re ready for pelotons of driverless cars yet. The technology is getting close, but the regulatory and liability aspects are so daunting. Rational people can see how many lives would be saved even with half-baked buggy driverless cars, but we are not governed by rational people.

I don’t think it’s compatible with the traditional private ownership model either, people’s typical lazy neglect and non-maintenance would cause too many problems. Is a car share / Uber sort of model something Apple would go after?

The more I think about this, the more interested I am in seeing what they come up with. If they really try to do this, it has to rank right up among the biggest risks a public corporation has ever taken.

Apple will also build a new city, like Atlantis, just off the California coast. They will only allow iCars there. Black turtle necks in winter, t-shirts in summer. Daft Punk will constantly play. Some call it paradise.

Lots of strategic decisions to be made…but what about the styling.

IF they stay with the reduced form vocabulary of softend rectangles and circles. I can see THAT:

to bear a modern day interpretation of THAT:

Could end up more condensed:
stock-footage-tin-can-rotates-on-white-background.jpg
mo-i

You know you have made it when people are making satires about you!

I’ll know I made it with hundreds of billions sitting a warchest. :slight_smile:

This is what I want from a auto-driving car.

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I feel like I had a toy car like this when I was a kid:

I have a buddy that worked on a symmetrical car when he was interning at GM. It’s completely doable to end up with something nice.

Love that. One of my friends design the cube. I’m going to send this to him! :slight_smile:

Conspiracy theory eh? I have a bad feeling, but I’m with you guys too

Did you guys know that the designer of the original Audi R8 Julian Hönig
went to Apple 5 years ago?

What has he been doing all that time?

On a site note: the latest Audi news make me frown. Q7 and R8 wtf? Did kia apple
and the likes really dissect Da Silvas dream team of 10 yeats ago that badly?

mo-i

P.S. writing here on an android mobile givescme constant rezising issues.
Can’t read sh*t!

Download Tapatalk, mo-i.

Interesting read.
Even though I’m not an apple fan I am excited to see a new player in the car industry, it’s awesome to see Teslas drive by. It’s also awesome to think of what you could do if you started from scratch. I’m extremely disappointed at how most cars have the same proportions, features, etc.
They will probably succeed. They already have the customer base + they have the money to assemble a team of experts in the car industry; I’ve seen it happen in the aircraft interiors industry.
I’ve always felt Citroen cars have an apple feel.

I honestly think all this speculation on what an Apple car will look like is pointless.
I think it is more likely that apple will be focusing on the computers inside cars to have an apple (OS) feel and quality.

Consider the following; all modern cars have really large displays and fullout, onboard computers, however there isn’t mush standard when it comes to size, interface, software and how it integrates. Every car company kind of does it their own way and though they look really cool, I feel consumers are impartial to them. People care more about the quality of their ipad displays and than the screens in their cars, in fact most people probably dont even care about the screen in their car or the software involved when making car decisions. Its kind of a ‘meh thats cool to have a digital display, but it is a nominal perk and I wouldn’t care if was there or not,’ after all, everyone at some-point was perfectly comfortable with analog feature in cars. Personally, when I see glimpses of UI in ford or BMW it looks totally alien, confusing, and glitzy-glammy. What?! now i have to learn how to use this weird OS from fast and furious that I have never even used before? Its like trying to use an old gaming console with some weird navigation…its not windows and its not apple, what is going on, how do I get it to do what I want? I give up.
Apple will probably try to capitalize on that, by developing --you already know-- , apps, software, UI, iconography, and most of all ties your car into your, phone, pad, computer family of electronics. People will say ‘wow, that onboard that I once overlooked when considering purchasing cars is now an apple and really understands me and my driving needs’. Car makers will say ‘we need to design to incorporate apple OS to sell more’.

I would say this is an obvious if not overdue step for apple and I hope there is success in the end.

I think you just described the Google Android car…

Apple would never make technology for a single small component. They want the entire ecosystem (see iTunes and App Store.)

Agreed that this would be the biggest risk ever undertaken by a private corporation. GM probably looks a little bit more seriously at Apple compared to the way Nokia looked at them ten years ago when the rumblings of a phone started. About pushing the envelope of customer preconceptions, this is the contents of the book locked in Tim’s safe. No more Flash, no DVD drives, phones that last more than a day on battery, user upgradeable computers. These are some examples of the impossible shifts that Apple is able to manifest.

There are some radical shifts needed to catch motoring up to the possibilities of today and the next five to ten years. All of them are guaranteed to make Jeremy Clarkson’s head explode. After all, Apple is about personal significance through group , not personal ego. In cars that is a great forward step.

Imagine an eventual ecosystem where there exists the same homogeneity as the phone market. What would be possible?
Suppose the cars link physically, an extendable drawbar, an “auto train” column that is capable of uniform acceleration and braking. This reduces some of the service or variance in performance issues. A low battery car could be supported in the middle of the pack. (credit card charged through iTunes for the cost.)

Apple only car lanes in California.

Roaming battery laden recharge cars that allow in motion charging like air tankers.

Uberesque model of pimping out your car the eight hours you are working and having it taxi others around. Reduction in corporate parking spaces. Some companies then mandate/supply this and reduce the parking spaces to near zero, turning their fleet into a money generator. “This ride brought to you by General Industries”.

There are a lot of doors that open. Agreed that what it actually looks like is about last on the list.

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to support their components, they would probably do some sort of yeah an ecosystem such as an electronic car system that already charges batteries or provides auto parts.

auto parts warehouse

Rumour is it will be entirely milled from a single block of aluminium.

Apple Uber?

What if Apple bought Uber and rolled out their car that way?

The “Why?” of the apple car is the interesting part of this to me. The earlier mention of Virgin Atlantic was a good reference. “Design” as a business is getting very bold right now and I think a lot of the perceptual footprint of that (even in light of all of the in-house moves going on) is the Design team as a 3rd party that can drop in and see the issues that you’ve been living with for so long that you no longer have perspective on.

Combine that with the fact that there could be a lot of white space around the idea of sitting in a box for some minutes to some hours (or days?) as the car takes you somewhere. How will you entertain yourself? Do you even need to be in the car for it to run your errands? Whats the interface on either end of those errands? (apps for ordering, humans or machines loading your car, what does the car do with it when it gets home) etc, etc

Then you get into the big iron data analytics stuff… if some large percentage of cars and logistics vehicles are automated, data models for traffic, delivery times, fuel consumption, etc all start getting a lot tighter. it’s kind of the ramification of all the big data talk from years past. someone has to make all that data usable.

Most of these areas are things that apple could more viably play in… much more so than the car itself. So perhaps the thinking is - if you control the centerpoint of all this stuff, then you can set and enforce the standards for all of the periphery… which is totally a page out of apple’s playbook.

Agreed. Couple that with the amount of coach Apple has on hand. They have to invest it in something, and something big. Viable industries would probably be:
Healthcare
Energy
Transportation

Transportation seems to connect most readily with their culture of fetishization of objects and and creating hero experiences out of everyday interactions though healthcare and energy would be much more beneficial.