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Apple Hiring Automotive Experts

Posted by Soulskill on from the cars-with-just-one-button dept.

An anonymous reader writes: A report at the Financial Times (paywalled) says Apple is on an aggressive hiring push to pick up automotive experts. Recent rumors suggest Apple is putting together a transportation research lab, and nobody outside the company is quite sure why. It's unlikely they's want to build an entire car themselves, but quite possible they see a big space for Apple technology within motor vehicles, much as Google seems to. They already have CarPlay, and it will doubtless grow, but we still don't have anything approaching a dominant platform for car software. Whatever they're working on, it looks like the competition for more robust computer technology in cars is heating up.

3 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. It would be great if google and apple enter ... by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The automotive electronics is in terrible shape. The auto engineers do not understand security, their computers have existed without network connections in isolation for a long time. Now data connections are making their way deep into the cars and recently BMW had a security update affecting some 2 million cars. It was apparently communicating to the servers nearly in clear text.

    Further the bean counters think the dash space to be some sort of profit center. "They bought our car right? Let us make them pay 200$ for map DVD upgrade, 1800$ for navigational package, ha ha haa, you negotiated 800$ using edmunds.com and truecar.com? Well buddy, I will get that money back, 900$ for mp3 player! ".

    Further they are used to product cycles running into decade or more and taking 9 months to admit the ignition switch has a problem and six years to hide it from NTSB. They are not used to software release cycle speeds of once in 8 months or once a year.

    They used to do this with car radios and make it impossible to install after market radios. Then SAE defined standard connectors and that market got some real competition. It is high time SAE define user interface API for the common things and allow third parties to come in with custom made tablets to be integrated into the cars. With the 3D printing advances, we could get clean molded plastic brackets that fit almost as good as factory made dash with custom tablets. The market is ripe. Hope two really big companies with good customer base enter and do a serious fight for market share.

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    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    1. Re:It would be great if google and apple enter ... by m00sh · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The automotive electronics is in terrible shape. The auto engineers do not understand security, their computers have existed without network connections in isolation for a long time. Now data connections are making their way deep into the cars and recently BMW had a security update affecting some 2 million cars. It was apparently communicating to the servers nearly in clear text.

      Further the bean counters think the dash space to be some sort of profit center. "They bought our car right? Let us make them pay 200$ for map DVD upgrade, 1800$ for navigational package, ha ha haa, you negotiated 800$ using edmunds.com and truecar.com? Well buddy, I will get that money back, 900$ for mp3 player! ".

      Further they are used to product cycles running into decade or more and taking 9 months to admit the ignition switch has a problem and six years to hide it from NTSB. They are not used to software release cycle speeds of once in 8 months or once a year.

      They used to do this with car radios and make it impossible to install after market radios. Then SAE defined standard connectors and that market got some real competition. It is high time SAE define user interface API for the common things and allow third parties to come in with custom made tablets to be integrated into the cars. With the 3D printing advances, we could get clean molded plastic brackets that fit almost as good as factory made dash with custom tablets. The market is ripe. Hope two really big companies with good customer base enter and do a serious fight for market share.

      Automotive electronics developers would say the same thing about consumer communication protocols. It is a mess that can't guarantee anything for even a simple control setup.

      There are plenty of people putting car computers etc in their cars. When manufacturers put in an entertainment system and someone crashes and dies because of something in it, fingers are pointed to the car manufacturers. They always have to worry about SAFETY!

      This isn't like a consumer device that if it crashes or freezes, it's not a big deal. If a car software system crashes, people die.

      Speaking of GM ignition switch problem, it perhaps affected one person or at most a few and they had to do multi-billion dollar recall. Windows has security holes that affects millions and they just issue a fix whenever they feel like it and just tell the users not to do stupid things. Completely different systems.

  2. Tim Cook, Just buy Telsa by byrddtrader · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Apple has roughly 175 billion in cash and Tesla's current market cap is around 35B. If Apple wants to get into the car business might as well jump in feet first. Not to mention you get one of the greatest CEO visionaries Elon Musk, since Steve Jobs. The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Apple is building its one electric vehicle that resembles a minivan.