Five people familiar with Apple’s car project, which by the way was code-named “Titan,” divulged to 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 spin off that is probably furthest along among Silicon Valley companies, has said repeatedly that it does not plan to produce its own vehicles.
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.
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.
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.
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 driver less cars. Apple, as always focused on clean designs, wanted to do away with the awkward cone.
Much like Dany in Game of Thrones, 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 people within the industrial design team including Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, believed that a fully driverless car would allow the company to re-imagine the automobile experience, according to the five people.
There was fierce debate about whether it should be programmed using Swift, Apple’s own programming language, or the industry standard, C++.
