20 things we learned about the Apple Car project

While vague on the surface, an Apple white paper detailing the company's approach to self-driving cars reveals some additional insights into its approach to autonomous vehicle development. Publication of the report followed a February 2019 disclosure that revealed Apple's safety drivers to be taking control of experimental self-driving cars approximately one time for every mile driven. That sounds like a lot, but I rather suspect the truth is this is connected with Apple's different approach to artificial intelligence (AI) rather than any weakness in its systems. My opinion (based on Apple's general approach to AI, which is to deploy intelligence at the edge rather than in the cloud) is that the company hopes to build a truly autonomous vehicle intelligence. You don't want a car that know it should turn left now, you want a car that knows that and also knows why it should do so – a level of contextual intelligence that also makes the vehicle more autonomous.