It is absolutely fine to re-engineer something from the ground up once you have a working example in your hand. But before then you are simply wasting your time.

the iPod was not the first music player, the iPhone not the first smartphone. Re-engineering those was the only way to get them to market in a way that might drive mass adoption.

As for the spherical wheels, yes, however such a development is totally tangential (pun intended) to self driving cars.

> But before then you are simply wasting your time.

I disagree. You seem to be discounting the learning aspect. Building an institutional knowledge base of the pile of systems that make up a car is a large task by itself. Different shops approach it differently. One may obsessively reverse engineer the competition, another might tinker with longtime designs.

I fully expect the managers in question saw the spherical wheels as something with maybe a 2% chance of becoming a reality, if that. The point at that stage is not to take a particular design to market, it is to explore the problem space, develop expertise, and work out what strategy to pursue.

From this article, it sounds like they figured out the strategy.

2%? How about 0.0002%.

0

I can't see spherical wheels working well. They would have a smaller contact patch on the road surface than a standard wheel, and consequently less traction.

And then there is stronger braking to be considered, which almost always is some kind of disk brake which you can't do if there is no shaft to mount one on. Which means the spherical wheel system would have to be oversized to compensate for lack of such a shaft even if it would work to drive the car. Magnetic wheels have other interesting problems that would need to be solved such as when two cars get close to each other the wheels would start to attract or repulse depending on their orientation.

This is mostly likely not something that could be rolled out even in a concept car with present day technology unless there is some kind of trick that I'm not aware of. Halbach arrays are not without problems if you allow them to be unconstrained in all dimensions.

If they are too big then the car will only have room for two: one in the front and one in the back.

TaDa: the self driving Tron motorcycle!

Could you just use standard wheels, but let all four of them turn 90 degrees? Then the car could move laterally.

There are some cars that already do this.

It's a lot simpler with independent electric motors per wheel, but generally not that useful as self drivings cars can already parallel park just fine.

You only need one wheel to turn very tightly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlLZE23EJKs

That's true. But then again, I did come up with live streaming video on the web and some other lesser known bits and pieces of technology. And I'd argue my lego sorting machine also required plenty of creative thinking.

There are definitely major challenges, although maybe those could work in areas where the motion is slow but constrained (e.g., a cart to move cars in/out/around a dedicated parking lot). Maybe flatten the surface used for normal motion and use sides for infrequent, slow maneuvers. I do not know.

But those ideas are tangential (being generous) to self-driving, so better not steal cycles from it.

Plus the whole sphere and its housing is going to take up a lot of volume.