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Cook Says Apple Is Focusing on Making an Autonomous Car System (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report: After years toiling away in secret on its car project, Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has for the first time laid out exactly what the company is up to in the automotive market: It's concentrating on self-driving technology. "We're focusing on autonomous systems," Cook said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. "It's a core technology that we view as very important. We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects," Cook said in his most detailed comments to date on Apple's plans in the car space. "It's probably one of the most difficult A.I. projects actually to work on." [...] "There is a major disruption looming there," Cook said on Bloomberg Television, citing self-driving technology, electric vehicles and ride-hailing. "You've got kind of three vectors of change happening generally in the same time frame." Cook was also bullish about the prospects for electric vehicles, a market which last week helped Tesla become the world's fourth-biggest carmaker by market capitalization, even as it ranks well outside the top 10 by unit sales."It's a marvelous experience not to stop at the filling station or the gas station," Cook said.
Ive discussed this ad nauseam with my MBA crowd. Long story short our guess is self-driving tech itself will not be a great industry to be in. As you correctly indicated the tech will be a commodity in a few years with a dozen different companies offering from a consumers point of view identical tech. The first to market will enjoy a temporary dump but that will be short lived.
What can be profitable is the driverless car platform, much the same way a phone OS is valuable, not because the technology to make a call is still a differentiator but because it allows you to control an entire industry
The current future paradigm is that the smart home, smart car, cell phone, and PC industries will become just one industry.