So it seems that behind closed doors they are reseraching a lot of different areas, trying to figure out which one to explore/exploit. That sounds logical, Microsoft/Google/... do the same, but funnily enough I never looked at Apple that way - I always only saw the shiny end products. Must be their marketing.

Even so, I'd be wary of a buying a new car from a first-time auto manufacturer, especially one with Apple's track record of compromised function. I'd be afraid that Apple, in trying to set their car apart from the competition, would build a car that is either unsafe or doomed to early failure. I'm sure people will line up to buy the iCar just like every other iProduct, but it may well prove sensible not to be amongst the first!

On the other hand, Apple has the capital to do this correctly. Even if they later decide to limit the scope of the project, it will pay dividends with their existing automotive control group. A project like this will take many years. But, with their best project managers, there's no doubt that they can do it. Who knows, with the kind of money they have now, I'd say even 5 years is doable.

But, be mindful that the existing existing players such as BMW, Ford, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes, Nissan, Tesla, Toyota and VW are all getting better too. Electric cars aren't rocket science, but with all the regulations and bureaucratic red tape surrounding the automotive industry, it may as well be.

Here's another kicker--Apple may be thinking about integrating some new thing(s) that are novel. It could be that Apple engineers have thought of some great way to combine X (and Y...) in some novel way with the automobile that will revolutionize the industry. If that's the case, you can expect even greater and more fanatical secrecy than the existing wall of silence.

Here's the nice thing about a project like this as I see it. Cars are fun. They're sexy and lots of kids dream about driving, building, fixing and/or designing them. This is the type of thing that gets the public eye and can rally existing employees and potential employees. Who wouldn't want to work on a car?

Lastly, just like the moonshot project of the 60's, you never know what technologies and ancillary benefits will come about because of something as complex and far-reaching as this appears to be.

Apple api's and documentation and deprecation - are more deliberate. and gives me more confidence that i won't end up with a bricked phone.

tldr; i'd still trust an apple EV over a google/android one.

Already, minivans are very popular in unofficial public transport systems in many less-developed countries. In Morocco, grand taxis are old Mercedes sedans that leave when full - they're cramped and reckless, and I bet minivans would be preferred if they were more readily available.

I think we'll see many people commuting in the near future by shared transport decided by efficiency algorithms and based on demand and prediction. Minivans could get 5-10 people into the CBD quite effectively in peak hour rather than the 1-2 people/car we see now, and without waiting for a bus or walking 3-5 blocks to the stop.

A minivan with swappable internal components could easy convert to sleep four people (a family on a roadtrip), or have bench seats facing a card table (like a train), or have four reclining seats (like a plane, watching movies on VR headseats).

I would add that interchangeable parts are probably not going to be a focus. The auto industries are pretty efficient at managing large supply chains to service several different models. If convergence was economically important it would happen more often.

I think a comfortable, self-driving car would be a quite pleasant alternative to flying in many cases, especially if you're likely to be hiring a car at the other end anyway and have a good amount of gear to stow on a trip.

But, a minivan or SUV/CUV? Those things ride high as a preference. I bet you could put a full foot high of batteries under that design and no one would even notice a change. Look at the Outlander PHEV, for example. It's got 12 kWh of low-density batteries in the floor and they didn't have to compromise interior space at all. I've always wondered why those things weren't the first vehicles to get electrified.

In the 1960's Toyota revolutionized operations management and it dominated the automotive industry.

In the 2010's Apple revolutionized operations management and ...

For example…

"Introduced in 1966, the [Toyota] Corolla managed to become the best-selling car worldwide by 1974 and has been one of the best-selling cars in the world since then." [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Corolla

Click on the google news result to get past the paywall.

Said he would need massive amounts of cash soon. Maybe he knew what's going on with Apple.

Or just that he needs money for the battery factory.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/b/1df875df-fb0c-4020-be...

I think if Apple is working on a car, it's going to be a mass-consumer competitor to Tesla, not anything to do with self-driving.

I'm with you on predicting that if Apple is getting into it, it will be non-autonomous, but I'm curious as to how you have reached your other incredulous conclusion.

* People talk about how automatic cars have been extensively tested. That's not really true. There's only a handful of them on the roads and they've been tested in limited conditions, with particular limits placed on suburban driving (slow speeds, etc.). I suspect there will be entirely new classes of bugs when there are hundreds of different AIs competing on the road, especially when mixed with normal human traffic.

* LIDAR does not work in poor weather conditions, including ice on the road.

* In terms of AI, getting to the 90% point is relatively easy, but it seems like the last 10% would require something resembling true intelligence. How do you deal with a lack of markers on the road? Dangerous situations in shady areas? Sensor equipment getting damaged and feeding your car wrong information? Animals and children running out last-second into the road? Severe obstacles at a distance? Tiny, cramped residential roads with non-sidewalk pedestrian traffic? Accommodating emergency vehicles and police? We shut off our brains when driving 90% of the time, but that last 10% does require human levels of intelligence. Furthermore, unless every car on the road is automated, the AI in automatic cars will need to deal with the idiosyncrasies of other human drivers. Sudden merges. Speeding. Road rage. Unexpected emergencies. Tailgating. An AI can't send and receive feedback to other human drivers and pedestrians; it can only use its model of human behavior to predict likely outcomes. (And this is saying nothing of other AIs on the road, who might behave completely unlike human drivers.)

* People say that automated cars only need to drive better than human drivers, not perfectly. I don't know if that's true. If automated cars drove perfectly 99.9999% of the time but then crashed horribly that remaining 0.0001% — taking some poor pedestrians or bicyclists along with them — I wouldn't get into one. And I don't think they'd be street-legal. Most people don't want to think about human lives in terms of numbers; they'd rather have control over their actions and accept the inevitability of occasional accidents, rather than having a machine that's practically guaranteed to eat up human lives every so often.

* Speaking of which, how does the car decide who gets to live in a life-or-death situation? Are there situations where the car would elect to kill the driver? Which programmer gets to make that decision? I'd like to know this information before getting into my car, please. The idea of offloading split-second moral decisions to an AI seems like it should be severely legislated.

* People talk about mesh networking improving traffic and whatnot. I can't even get my USB devices to work across OSes half the time, and we're talking about sophisticated traffic control across multiple manufacturers? Especially given the quality of software that car companies tend to put out?

* Self-driving technology is extremely expensive, and most cars on the road are pretty cheap. You'd have to have some sort of insane subsidy program to get more than the 1% driving automated cars.

* People want to get in their self-driving cars drunk, but I think there will be severe legal hurdles in the way of that.

I think semi-automated and AI-augmented driving are certainly possible. Highways are easy enough to tackle. I could see some expensive cars getting that capability over the next few decades, as well as maybe cargo trucks. But endpoint to endpoint driving, where you could snooze on your way to work? I don't think so.

Thousands of human drivers crash horribly every day and over a million people die every year by car accidents in the World. If humans "crashed terribly" 0.0001% and a self driving car did so 0.00005%, it would already be a great improvement.

I don't have solid data about this, but I think LOTS of the current accidents are due to drivers being reckless, distracted. high or emotional. Self-driving cars would introduce some new risks, but they would take away lots of the current ones.

And for many of the situations that you list, there is a simple solution: the car should have two modes, self-driving and human-driving. Self-driving will only work when conditions are normal. Incompatible weather conditions? Broken sensor? The car parks itself, and you need to drive yourself or wait for assistance.

That would be a good solution, but many people who talk about self-driving cars don't want that. They want to sleep in the car. They want to "drive" home drunk. In both cases, a manual override would be disastrous and probably illegal. (We can already get a DUI just for getting into a car while drunk!) They also want to be able to "fetch" their cars without a driver, which wouldn't work.

Regarding the sleeping and "fetching" your car, those would still be compatible: simply, if the conditions aren't good, the car would respectively park and wake you up, or inform you that it can't respond to your fetch request at the moment.

Regarding a drunk/high person, it would still be an improvement to the current situation: most of the times you wouldn't drive yourself.

I feel like AI would outperform the heck out of us in that situation, because solving it correctly involves a) high situational awareness, which we suck at because we get distracted, and b) making split-second calculations, which we suck at because we panic and our reflexes aren't that fast. I mean, this is a simple situation, when it comes down to it:

Something runs out into the road.

- Can you swerve and avoid hitting it without hitting anything else or driving off the road? If yes, do. If no:

- Can you hit the brakes without endangering anyone behind you? (Humans tend to have trouble with this decision, because half the time we forget to watch the rear view mirror and now there's no time to check. An AI would ALWAYS know what was behind it.) If yes, do. If not:

Are you more worried about endangering the thing before you or the thing behind you? If it's an animal, hit the animal. If the thing in front of you is a squishy human and the thing behind you is a car protected by all the engineering that protects cars in crashes these days, hit the brakes.

That's all there is to it, 99 % of the time. Sure, this is a situation where AI might make the wrong decision in 1 % of cases, but it's also a situation where humans are wrong much more than that.

<em>How do you deal with a lack of markers on the road?</em>

This one is actually probably most easily solved by just putting markers on all roads. Sure, that would require driving down all roads in a specially-engineered expensive vehicle with a dedicated crew, so you think it sounds like unaffordable insanity until you realize google has already done it once, for the googlemaps mapping project. Just do it again, this time in a car made for spray-painting markers instead of mapping stuff.

Apart from that, the overwhelming majority of problems on the road can be solved by yielding even when you're technically in the right and just slowing the heck down, if necessary to walking speed and below. There will still be problems that only a human being can solve, but there's going to be a human being in the car, so worst case, pull over and ask them. If your human is drunk or underage, pull over, wait for the next passing car, watch how their human solves it, and do what they did. In the rare case where there's no other car likely to pass any time soon and the human in the car is incapacitated - possibly some sort of remote solution would work, where a human in some kind of remote driving center can take control of your car for a minute if necessary?

There'll still be high-speed situations where the AI will fuck and kill someone, but I do think people would come to accept self-driving AI even if it occasionally fucks up and kills people, because it'll be world-changingly convenient. And so far we've accepted a LOT of occasionally-deadly shit if it's sufficiently convenient. (Trains. planes. Nuclear reactors. Every single one of those things had waves of protests and people going "It will never work, and when it fails, people will die! Not worth it!"

And occasionally they failed, and people died, but we still keep using them.

My understanding is that current self-driving technology works great at short range, but is pretty incapable of dealing with obstacles at a distance. If there are things far away that are potentially dangerous — kids, a car behaving erratically, a landslide — I can slow down in case something happens. A self-driving car might have more trouble until the obstacle gets in range, by which point it might be too late.

> Are you more worried about endangering the thing before you or the thing behind you? If it's an animal, hit the animal.

What if it's somebody's pet? Sometimes putting a dent in someone's car is worth saving a beloved animal's life. What if you're about to hit someone and there's a bicyclist behind you? There will be times when the car will have to make decisions regarding which life to save, including the driver's.

> This one is actually probably most easily solved by just putting markers on all roads.

This isn't possible on all roads. Markers can be covered by snow, mud, etc. Yes, you can have RFID markers or whatever, but that would be incredibly expensive. Who's going to pay the bill? The taxpayers? Why?

Also, I was just reminded of parking: how the heck will self-driving cars deal with the current parking rules? It takes all my intelligence just to figure those out sometimes!

> There'll still be high-speed situations where the AI will fuck and kill someone, but I do think people would come to accept self-driving AI even if it occasionally fucks up and kills people, because it'll be world-changingly convenient.

But self-driving cars won't be world-changingly convenient. I don't drive. I don't have to: trains, buses, and occasionally planes take care of my transportation needs for me. I can already snooze on my way to work, get home when I'm drunk, etc. Who will these cars change the world for? Silicon Valley types who want to commute and go on vacation without bumping into anyone else? Because the poor certainly won't be able to afford them, country folks won't be able to use them, and Europeans will probably have no need for them. (Heck, they're still mostly on manual transmissions. And have you looked at the gas prices over there?!)

When we went from horses to trains (and eventually cars and planes), it made it possible for humans to travel across the entire world in a matter of hours. Self-driving cars won't be that kind of leap.

I think it would be much healthier for our cities to focus on developing public transit infrastructure. The best places I've ever lived have been threaded by a city-wide metro system, with commuter trains connecting to further regions. Pedestrians benefit. Suburbanites benefit. The city feels more compact and walkable. You can even get rid of some of the roads!

Exactly a situation where you want the black-and-white AI solution. If it's a 1% chance the human dies and 100% chance the pet dies, the pet has to go every time.

> This isn't possible on all roads.

It doesn't have to be all roads to be transformational. Tag major city roads + self-driving cars + uber = Johnny Cab. Tag major transit routes + self-driving trucks = no sleepy truckers, no paying sleeping truckers, no rest breaks, on-demand cross-country trucking in 48 hours or less.

This, of course, ignores human desires for control and "freedom of the road" (at least in the US). Who knows how the technology would actually catch on, especially when Johnny Cab DOES run over Fluffy.

Like you, I'm very skeptical that we'll get self-driving cars any time soon, and somewhat skeptical that we'll get them in my lifetime. But what would be the point of expressing skepticism here?

I'm not investing my money on it, and I'd be annoyed if significant amounts of public money were being dolled out for it, but if Google and others want to spend a few billions investing on AI instead of funding a few yachts for their shareholders, I'm all for it. And like you pointed out, if anything self-driving cars will be held to an higher standard in terms of security, so I don't see a problem there either.

There was an article recently saying how people bought lottery tickets to justify dreaming big about their possibilities. If Google wants to pay for our ticket, I'm not complaining.

(By the way, I say this as a layman. If I was an expert on, say, LIDAR and I had a specific criticism that hadn't previously been raised, I'd speak about it.)

On the other hand, I would kill for an electric (or even hybrid) minivan. The Model-S with 2 extra seats just isn't enough room.

On the gripping hand, look at how Apple played the industry and pundits on sapphire. Where is WSJ getting their info - they didn't even describe their sources.

"GT Advanced officially confirmed its settlement with Apple and the closure of some of its sapphire plants. As part of the deal, Apple will recover its $439 million pre-payment made to GT Advanced over the course of four years, without interest. The Mesa factory will be closed and all of its 650 employees laid off, but GT will retain ownership of production and ancillary assets. GT and Apple will “continue their technical exchange,” and work on developing next generation sapphire crystal."

http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/apple-sapphire-screen-su...

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/apple-is-gearing-up-to-challen...

Don't electric cars fall into the category of consumer electronics?

1. Compete in luxury electric automotive market. Motivation is there, but I find it dubious that Apple will go for it. On the other had Apple does have everything they need to become strong player in this field (engineers, cash, supply chain, strong U.S. lobbying presence, and army of lawyers)

2. Get competence on how to build cars in order to be able to rapidly prototype integration of Apple products with car entertainment systems. Possibly design said entertainment systems for car manufacturers, or at least influence the design to give apple products an edge.

Did the old film cameras fall under consumer electronics? I don't think so. What about analog telephones from the 90's? What about overhead projectors and phonograph players (I hope that's what they were called)?

Those devices have changed. I have to imagine the umbrella of 'consumer electronics' is constantly expanding. In the long term, why would cars be any different?

Maybe it's a demonstration platform to show partners what a well integrated system could feel like. Perhaps Apple wants to make the guts of the car control/infotainment system instead of just projecting an image over the OEM system.

Early reports on CarPlay from various vendors said that they varied widely in hardware speed/quality (I believe Ferrari's was said to be pretty bad). Apple doesn't like relying on third parties for their user experience (see: Moto ROKR).

In reality, they are more likely to get a patent on some trivial detail, turn around, and start suing the pants off Tesla for having the temerity to steal their 'inventions' - slide to unlock, revisited.

Price may be the differentiating factor, but I think most ppl would choose the innovator.

I think history has shown that most people will choose the imitator, if the imitation is a good one.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/creation-myth

Regular consumers can careless about who had the original idea, they only care about who executed best.

People buy from whoever does the best marketing (that is, whoever makes them feel like they are getting the best product for them.)

> Regular consumers can careless about who had the original idea

(Nitpick: "careless" is not the same thing "care less")

Regular consumers probably do care about originality, which is why being "the original X" often plays a key role in marketing, in products in a wide array of different markets. If it wasn't something consumers tended to care about, it wouldn't likely be a perennial marketing point.

It is, of course, not the only thing consumers care about, obviously.

> they only care about who executed best

Arguably, they don't care directly about who executed best, they care about who they trust to execute best for them. Evidence about having executed well to others, like being the original in a category, may be indicators by which consumers judge that likelihood.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8962872

Basically, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have so much money, they could take on a huge problem and "invent" the future.

Apple maintains one of the largest software portfolio's in the world, even Tim Cook doesn't think Apple is a hardware company and makes billions a quarter directly from its software and services:

http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-is-not-a-hardw...

That's not including the R&D that goes into developing iOS/OSX which they give away for free to complete the iPhone/iPad UX, which would be nowhere near as successful if it weren't for iOS and the optimized apps that ship with it.

In the Bay Area, a van registered to apple was spotted. The van was mounted with hardware that is unmistakably designed for car automation, namely spinning cameras at the front and rear. It is basically conclusive that the car is a self driving prototype and not something for apple maps. There is video of that van linked below. This is not conclusive evidence that Apple has intentions to enter the EV market, though.

Recently, Apple has hired people from the automotive industry, including some from Tesla (Articles that state this as fact cite linkedin, so I am assuming it is true). Basically, based on the qualifications and expertise of these hires, it can be concluded that Apple is not assigning them to work on CarPlay, which is the only known alternative. (I have not verified this myself but feel that it is OK to accept as true for the time being).

As far as I could tell everything else out there is speculation or not verifiable. There are various instances of bloggers and reporters claiming that they have gotten word from Apple employees that Apple is exploring the possibility of entering the EV market. These employees have all remained anonymous and there is no evidence that their claims are genuine or accurate.

My own conclusion is that there is a strong possibility that Apple is attempting to enter the EV market in some way. Let us ignore the evidence that has come to the surface as of late. The EV market has a lot of growth left and a lot of unclaimed territory. Apple has a lot of cash sitting around, a relative familiarity with power electronics and most importantly a very strong leader, Tim Cook. Apple is large and old but it does not appear to be fragmented and it is, IMHO, still capable of pouncing on new opportunities and markets. The means, motive, and opportunity all seem to exist in the case of Apple and EVs. And bringing the recent observations back into the equation only appears to strengthen the hypothesis.

video of van: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lhU54nhyyk

http://www.macrumors.com/2015/02/04/mysterious-apple-car/

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple-is-working-on-a...

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-employee-well-give-tesl...

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-more-evidence-that-appl...

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-testing-street-view-com...

And had recruiters call random people at Google, Samsung and Apple ...

I cannot quite get my head around this - Apple is an excellent engineering, sales and design company with gigantic wealth - but the leap from computers and phones into automobile is very big. They have little in common wrt. sales, technology and support.

Why would this work out? And does noone question the sanity of it?

It might very well be the largest mistake Apple has ever done and seal its demise or the smartest move and they will be a global dominant company even more so than today...

Same goes for the ipod.

Only thing they had expertise in was computers. And with computers becoming extremely important for cars, they might just have a chance. Just as much as google, and they don't have any particular domain knowledge either (ie. they have never sold a car before).

I'll gladly believe that Apple will produce a car with a completely amazing user experience for its center console.

But I'll take a car with a less amazing user experience for its center console if it drives better, gets better mileage, has lower maintenance, costs tens of thousands of dollars less, and looks good on the outside. Apple has no expertise there, and it's a complicated business.

We like to sort of claim Tesla as our own, but it's not a computer company, it's a car company. Maybe Apple can create a car company ex nihilo, but that's a lot less in their wheelhouse than producing a rectangle with a touchscreen on it.

What if you change those facts? It's not too hard to imagine a world where computers could have greater effect on your car driving experience than just simple things like a music player or voice recognition.

Except these are improved with improved software now...for example battery technology isn't anything without good software, same with maintenance (software is the reason why the F-35 is orders of magnitude cheaper to maintain over the lifecycle)

>We like to sort of claim Tesla as our own, but it's not a computer company

Except it is...

At its heart, Tesla is a software developer dressed in a carmaker's robes. The Silicon Valley company has focused on developing its software to be the primary component behind its fleet's sophisticated safety and battery systems, not to mention its infotainment console[1]

Tesla is closer to being a technology company than a traditional automobile maker.[2]

[1]http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/04/11/is-tesla-mo... [2]https://www.ihs.com/articles/features/tesla-motors.html

Again, we are talking about a company that took in 75 billion last quarter. If a scrappy upstart can get into the industry, I don't doubt Apple could.

Also, this is probably an automated Uber service so you can focus on your Apple devices, not the driving experience.

And who knows ,if it's not good enough in the rest that's needed, it can always cooperate.

And sadly, much as I am invested in the Apple ecosystem, Apple's software QC has gone downhill.

Yosemite and iOS 8 both suffer many glaring, obvious bugs that have been present since the beta/DPs with no sign of fixes.

That leads to recalls and lawsuits with cars.

Surely one would be a TV. Smart TVs right now are woeful, and just providing a weak set-top box on the side might provide something at an accessible price point, but it doesn't solve the real problem.

An ideal smart TV would pre-fetch EPGs to load and switch quickly, have an optional social layer over the video feed (like what Xbox One proposed), and more naturally fit in with other hardware and ways of getting media to the screen.

http://blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml discusses a variety of personal computer milestones, sadly also disagreeing that "Apple literally invented the personal computer".

Down vote if you find what I'm saying factually wrong.

-- signed, someone who lives in a household with 2 rMBPs, an iPhone 6, 5S, 2 iPad Airs, and an iMac.

Marching into the brave new world of silos, a car is an easy addition to Apple platform, while GM would need to build a platform to add to their cars.

In modern cars where nearly everything is computer-controlled and un-serviceable by the end user, safety is pretty much guaranteed, and fuel economy is average.. what other choices are there? It's just as plausible that someone would choose a car based on built-in entertainment options as that they'd do so based on color scheme.

who said entertainment system? Design is among, if not the, main aspects when people decide on tech choice. With cars being electric - simple commoditized drivetrain - design will become even more important.

i think electric cars for some segment like "Millenial urbanites" would be a market where Porsche and Mercedes don't have any starting advantage in car design over Apple as all their established design themes of high power/dynamics, masculinity, posh-ness, etc... wouldn't resonate that much there.

About winning the smartphone war, if Apple won it, that was the war for cash. Android won the war for usage, same way IE won the browser wars. I wonder what's the margin on a car. If you have to make low margin products to keep selling high margin ones you end up low margin overall. So, if Apple goes for $50+k cars, it will still be a high margin business but even more biased towards the richest consumers. If it goes for 10k cars, that will be a big change in strategy.

Edit: very funny, you mysterious downvoters. Now the downvotes are on _this_ comment, and the original one has been upvoted 4 times. And I still haven't learned how/why I should change my behavior in the future. The only thing I've learned is that up/down voting seems to be random.

Occasionally getting downvoted not withstanding, a user's karma tends to only go up over time, as long as the account isn't flagged in any way. It's generally not a battle between negative and positive karma - getting downvoted is more of a short-term signal that others found the quality of your post wanting. So in an environment where there are many more upvotes than downvotes, a 500 karma limit is merely a means to stop novice users from dishing out punishment until they become more experienced users.

Downvoting a comment sends a harsh signal to the commenter that you believe their comment is so bad it shouldn't be there, but it's an unsuitable tool to influence the discussion at large.

> Why was it raised?

I've been here a few years and to my knowledge the limit wasn't raised during that time.

> If karma doesn't work to exclude people with unpopular opinions then there's no point to the limit.

As someone who mostly only posts if he has something contrarian to say, I don't think it's about unpopular opinions. Yes, I receive some downvotes, but mostly people just ignore me, so my average comment karma is very low. That's what you can expect for having unpopular or boring opinions. Reaching the karma threshold necessary for downvoting on the other hand isn't really that big of a deal, nor is it really a challenge.

HN's primary exclusion mechanism is flagging, not downvoting. In a way it's more insidious because you may not even notice it's happening. People get shadowbanned, even. Or, as apparently happened to me yesterday for the first time as far as I can tell, a moderator steps in and forcefully pushes your comment below the much older "green newbie" comments where the thoroughly grey content goes to die.

Downvoting is at least an overt signal, like I said. And personally I think the capability to issue a downvote is probably overrated.

> tilt the discussion toward their viewpoint

Discussions on HN are generally not happening on the razor's edge of opinions. Instead, they tend to be carried out by people who are very certain of their own viewpoint. There is so much momentum, tilting these things is not an issue. But if you can voice a coherent minority opinion, that comment might still get to the top of the thread.

> Surely you must have noticed how cliquey HN is.

It depends, I think there are several big blocks of people here who think alike, but I noticed the biggest influence on how a post is received often seems timezone-related.

I guarantee they are not working on a complete vehicle. Probably battery systems and some type of autonomous control, if anything.

I think this is just a moonshot program to attract engineering talent.

They certainly have the chutzpah to try, and they have an ocean of money to spend overseas. A longshot bet on building another trillion dollar product might be preferable to paying corporate and personal income tax on dividends.

Apple may have almost $200 billion but where would they get the batteries, to focus on just one aspect of it? Tesla found there literally wasn't enough battery supply and decided to build the largest battery factory in the world from scratch to provide what they needed, and it's been in planning for years and won't be ready for a few years to come. And again, money isn't the blocking issue. It would be laughable to suggest that Apple could just conjure up a comparable factory out of nowhere....it would take them just as long.

And given their penchant for overseas labor, it would take even longer. Don't even get me started on that. It's like Elon has said: importing phones in bulk is one thing; importing cars or large heavy things is wholly another. They would really have to do it in the US, which could hardly be done in secrecy. Car manufacturing plants tend to be large and obvious.

My point: maybe they'll get into it, but it won't come out of nowhere and it will certainly take a LOT of time regardless of their bank account. Tesla will be many years ahead of them for the long-term foreseeable future.

As a matter of fact, Apple's last quarterly profit was $18bn, while Tesla's valuation, is $25bn. They could buy a company like Tesla every two quarters..

Furthermore, maybe what they are trying to do is to create some in-house talent, in preparation for future purchases. Perhaps so that they can have their own employees join those of the acquired company..

Fashionable utility.

They get this better than anyone. Cars would seem like such a logical next step in that regard.

I sure hope this is just a red herring Apple threw at the media to have them trip on their shoelaces.

What I like about Musk an his company is that he's not evil (yet?) and so for now the private space industry and electric vehicles are looking really nice.

Answer: Paywall

Here's the link for anyone interested:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-titan-car-project-to-chal...

https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...