The Apple Car: An Embarrassing Disaster 

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I got into the rabbit hole of car engineering after leaning about and buying a classic Citroen, and I gotta say, a lot of people _reeeeaaaallly_ underestimate how incredibly difficult it is to not only design a car from the ground up, but to also establish a reliable manufacturing process for the _thousands_ of precision parts that make up a car. Even the big boys in car manufacturing usually outsource manufacturing of parts from facilities that are dedicated to manufacturing one specific kind of part and all the tooling it requires. The only moron who could glance at that monumental task and say "Nah, I'd win" is a tech bro.

Hurr hurr no “windows”

I kind of love the idea that Apple thought Google would be their competitor in the car market instead of established automotive companies.

Only KnowledgeHusk can talk about things that happened like 5 years ago and make it sound like its ancient history.

My take from all this is: There's a reason Apple assumed the Google car would only work with Google phones And that's because, apple's approach to making their own car would most certainly be: make it only work with Apple phones

11 days after this video gets published, the car project gets scrapped completely haha

I appreciate that you consistently got Tim Apple's name correct in the video.

I hope the Apple car is a literal apple car like the one that Lowly Worm drives in Richard Scarry's Busy Town.

And literally less than 2 weeks after this video came out Apple officially cancels the project 😂😂.

I remember talking with people about this and people being so excited 💀

This video aged remarkably well

Remember that one post about the Apple Car 2 releasing and every Apple Car's performance being limited as a result, which causes chaos to ensue

I remember when I was a kid, watching some news short about self driving cars and my mother telling me that this would be a thing by the time I was a adult. And this relieved me as I had been in several accidents up to this point and the thought driving scared me. Unfortunately here I am, driving myself, with the future of fully self driving cars perpetually near and far like Tantalus in Tartarus.

I hear these new horse things are low emissions and drive themself.

Google and Apple got so huge because the profit margins on software is huge. You don't need to buy factories and machines and materials and keep it all running. What made these CEOs want to go into the "low tech" world of car manufacturing.

as an ex truck driver in living in Michigan, I can tell you that these manufacturers do not seem to take account of winter driving conditions.

Li-DAR shoots light out and the light bounces and returns to the sensor to put it as simply as possible. These returns come at different times depending on how far the light traveled before hitting something and returning. using this you can map an area by using the light returns as points and how long it took for each to return to determine depth. You can get very accurate visualizations using this, especially with higher end Li-DAR sensors. This way the car can "see" better than when using normal cameras as the light bounces around most obstacles that would hinder a normal camera. We recently did tests using a Li-DAR sensor for a grant proposal and made a very detailed map of our lab, even showing everyone sitting at their desks working. We got a 3d image made by only points.

Was doomed from the start - Apple can't run with Windows.

"Wait until the technology improves and costs go down". That doesn't work like that. Technology doesn't improve itself, someone has to do. And if you "wait until it does", you are just waiting until someone else does the job. And that other someone is who will get the patent.

Lidar is actually worse in bad weather than cameras. Lidar is a bit like radar, but with lasers, so it sends out a laser and awaits for its return, but water in the air (i.e. bad weather) disrupts the light of a laser so it either doesn't return or is too messed up to be useful. Cameras on the other hand only receive visuals, so there is no problem with that as humans already proved that it's possible to drive with only that much. With cameras you get the same information that a human driver, but with lidar you only get the shape of the environment. If human can drive a car, then a car with the same capabilities should too (i.e. vision, acceleration, mind), no need to over engineer things.

12:28 turns out this car will be..... nothing! news just came out today that apple scrapped the whole project.

The edits on this video were top tier. Probably can afford the best editors with all that sponsor cash.

Lol it was announced that the plug was officially plugged on this yesterday.

Oh my god I love the animations in this one 😍

They should have called it the iCar.

Can speak from experience, I live on one of those fabled dirt roads in Michigan and I can wash my car almost every week and it will still be covered in mud or slush up to the doors, so a camera would be a no go unless I want a car wash indicator

lmao i loved that steve jobs intro section

damn you got it out at the perfect time

Why don't we invent teleportation instead of sentient cars?

7:48 - Lidar doesn't really perform that much better in poor weather than regular cameras.

That makes sense, all computer nerds graduate to car nerds.

It's funny that apple were worries about google's car only working with google's phone, when every other google product works better on iphone than it does on android. I guess since apple only make their tech work with itself, they assume others will do the same.

So I did surveying for a little bit and I was fortunate enough to participate in LIDAR work. Our job was to basically shoot GPS points that the LIDAR was going to use as a base for their data. LIDAR is crazy, because it's basically like this. Our job entails us 'shooting' points to map out terrain, objects, roads, etc. And we used a small tablet that's attached to a measured rod to take accurate shots. You shoot a point every 10 steps or so and another until you got a bunch of points you can draw a line through. Now LIDAR is that but on crack, from what I was told They had a truck that had this device on it and it is designed to shoot MILLIONS of shots. Apparently when you would bring it up on the computer it would look like you were staring at the actual environment. That's how many shots it would take. Now granted that's all from what I was told so take it with a grain of salt. However another good example would be 'The Voidness' LIDAR Horror Game.

"Would you rather run over a bus full of children, or the woman you love?" What kind of autonomous car are you talking about that can choose to run over a bus full of children? A monster truck?

I still don’t think that there will ever be fully autonomous cars unless there is a specialized road for them or all other cars are banned. There’s just too many variables to account for and even if you do, what if there is some major systematic failure? Maybe technologically we could get there, but I think it’s a real tough sell for people to put all of their control in a machine’s hand like that, when it’s something they can already do. Maybe this will change but I think it could take generations.

I have worked in different levels of the auto industry. Most people have no idea the level of logistics involved with manufacturing even a single vehicle. You should see these factories, and that's just where they assemble and paint. The supply industry is the insane part. Just a single door panel mold requires a 20 ton mold, and you need 20 of them, then you need a 2500 psi injection machine to run it on top of that you need at least 2 mold so you can run 24 hours while the other mold is being serviced. That's just the investment on a door panel manufacturing. It is such an insanely intricate supply chain. Just one manufacture may have hundreds of suppliers. Making a car is no simple task at all. Also you have to deal with several unions at several different levels which complicates things exponentially. venture to guess that the BOM cost is far less, maybe 25% of what you are actually paying for your vehicle.

Your visual humor is honestly getting better and better

Waymo legit sounds like a made-up brand Whimsu would come up with.

The Google car is really really suspiciously close to the rumored Apple car plans

The Google Car is the greatest bluff ever played in business. Apple had a four of a kind in its hand in 2008 and Google bluffed having a straight flush, and Apple bought it.

I love the art it this video. Your style is always a treat to look at

Man... your'e vids are some of the best!

Self-driving cars is impossible because in driving there is social signals it might work in highways but would never walk in downtown areas

Great video, I swear I already watched the whole thing even if it's been up for under a minute

The animation you did and video editing = chefs kiss

the 90 seconds before the ad are wonderful. keep it up

There will never, ever be a fully automated car that can drive itself with zero issues. the world is a unpredictable, nothing looks the same everywhere and it is impossible to program a system to understand everything. To have a fully self driving car the car needs a references, it needs to see things it can understand with zero issues. Engineering relies heavily on redundancy and in order to do that we cannot rely on a camera seeing a STOP sign and can get confused for the smallest reason. The only option is slowly implementing things in our construction that can be dedicated for this system. How do make a STOP sign with redundancy? Add a second smaller sight with QR code, add RFID signal, have different shapes, have a network of cameras and sensors in the street that can communicate with the cars to compile information rather than relying on split second decision. If a Tesla is flying down the highway it can only react to what it can see but if it get a signal from several sources that 2 miles down the road there is an accident it wouldn't need to rely on seeing it first . if we hade roads lined with some special marker that a car can understand it wouldn't need to analyze every frame and rely on GPS only to understand that this is indeed a road that is 3 meter wide. It would use that information to calibrate and refine

I do appreciate you calling Tim Apple by his name which is Tim Apple.

when the surf shark showed up, i got so excited, like that “here comes dat boi” meme

so you ARE that floating cat thing!! i found that channel and thought the voice was uncannily like yours and this confirms it. you have so many channels

You reminded me of a time when the Apple car was a serious topic in medias focused on Apple products and rumours

Best Jobs roast ever.

Whatever the subject of the video may be, this channel’s content is gold

I like this style of animation that you do

great animation, great content, nice and fun narration keep it up

Best surf shark add I’ve ever seen

4:38 - I've grown really fond of this ice fellow.

Does anyone know the name of the song that played during the surf shark ad? Also the outro?

Liked the sponsor segment, that was awesome

Dude I love the surf shark and the surf shark noises.

What was that song you played in your surfshark ad? It was very charming

Your jokes/commentaries only appeal to a specific generation and finally that generation is me and I love it.

3:45 implying that I don't in my Ford F150

The amount of times you said "Google car", this should turn into a drinking game to torture my liver!

“Vegetarianism and all those other diseases” I agree 😝

2:32 there's also Rivian as well, though they only sell their EV's here and around in the Tristate area (for now).

They could have used those resources in selling fruits (they already have the branding for that) instead of selling cars.

I'm surprised this took a week to show up in my feed when I watch and like every single one of your videos. I hate RU-vid ha

I use Waymo all the time in San Francisco in 2024

7:53 LIDAR is really simple. It's RADAR but using lasers. That's it. It's that simple. LIDAR was the new hip technology at the time and is still widely used today to scan physical objects, especially at massive scale. Most geospatial mapping of terrain is done using LIDAR.

I like the idea of the google car in theory, and in practice I'd hack it to be able to take manual control using a hidden controller, not a wireless one for safety reasons. LMAO

always hated the whole philosphising how auto cars should react in a crash, you follow the fucking road laws and slam the breaks, moving pradictably prevents further accidents, sure you might still hit them but swurving you could roll the car and cause a crash in the other lane, or for dangerous cliff or bridge roads just make the driver fall to their death. it's like when someone in a discord server said a solution to multilane pileups is for each lane to be its own speed, they already are lol, you're supposed to overtake in the inner lanes and allow breakdown cars to leave the motorway on the outerlane, be it a dedicated breakdown lane or just in the grass either side of the motorway. road laws already have this defined from the confusion from horse carraiges to motor vehicles, the issue is if you're going on a journey long enough to need to stop driving yourself, take a train or plane lol. the amount of technical leaps that need to be made just so people can get away with drunk driving is one of the most 1st world problem things i've heard lol

I remember all those Motley Fool ads about the “Apple Car”

It'd be cool to hear you talk about news spots about the car or promotional videos from the time and commentate over them bro

Remember when it was illegal to use your phone while driving? Now they have built in I-pads u HAVE to use to do anything. It would be hilarious if in order to use this car you needed: a apple watch, a Mac book, an I-phone, the apple vision headset just to operate this apple car AT ALL lol I can see Apple doing that

Something else notable about some of the new car companies like Rimac and Rivian is that they aren't market disruptors in any meaningful sense - Rivian had a huge investment from Ford before Amazon came in and pumped even more money into them, and Rimac has a substantial minority ownership by Porsche.

LOTS of chinese cars are being sold in the global south, like in the last 2 years more chinese cards have been sold in my country than non-chinese ones. This is LATAM for reference.

Let's hope they improve their ar glasses before inegrating it for their car ecosystem

Making a car is harder than any consumer electronic. The logistics, supply chain, regulations, low margins, and repair ecosystem, unions, supplier relationships, factory setups, warranties, consumer buy-in all are hard to build up. The product design and software part is manageable with people; which is not the case with the supply chain. Supplies have their own loyalty towards bands and millions of trade secrets. Anyone from a FANG company will look at this will have a mental breakdown over the web of suppliers, sub parts, and margins. It's not like you can just make more databases to scale production or just source another IC chip from TI, Foxconn, or Samsung.

Imagine doing a drive by with one of these, gotta program the path ahead of time

Waymo is everywhere in SF. So it seems that they are pretty serious

2:57 Croatia 🥶

How dumb is humanity that we would rather sink billions into making self driving cars, rather than just pay some humans to drive other humans around in trains, buses and cars?

Many big technical inaccuracies.

Completely silent: *makes shark noises* Staaahhp!

Ah yes, good old Tim Apples...

I'm plastered right now 🍻

Wasn't there a really brief cameo of this thing in Transformers The Last Knight?

Obamna 😢

Good ol' Michigan dirt roads, pot holes and all. 😂

@7:41 goes hard lol.

Honestly, the Apple Car was doomed when Steve Jobs died from Ligma.

5:49 Big hero 6?

Thanks for the Michigan love!

5:50 Baymax? Was his face design already a thing back then, or did those seats came first?

8:00 I believe LIDAR uses lasers to more accurately detect the distance of an object by counting how long until the light from the laser is reflected back by its soundings

In this video you speak the way I think. I like that.

The final frontier is now someone else's frontier/already blazed trail...

Song at the end?