After having almost more than 1.000 employees working on the project for an autonomous vehicle built and designed by Apple, the company saw the project get out of hand and had no choice but to focus your efforts on creating an autonomous driving system to sell to vehicle manufacturers, leaving aside the manufacture of their own vehicle.
To date, Apple has 55 of its own vehicles conducting tests on the roads of California, being the second largest fleet in the state, not from the country. The vehicle used to perform these tests is a Lexus RX450hs, a brand owned by Toyota. But it seems that Apple wants to go further and has signed an agreement with Volkswagen to begin testing on larger vehicles.
Apple wants to create a much more complex autonomous driving system, a system that can be implemented on buses. To do this, it has teamed up with Volkswagen to begin testing passenger transport vans, after having received the refusal of both Mercedes and BMW. In this way, Apple will transform the T6 model vans into autonomous vehicles so that Apple Campus employees can move quickly through the new facilities.
According to The New York Times, this project is considerably behind schedule, which has forced the company to allocate all possible resources to this new project of autonomous driving of minibuses, a system that will later be implemented in buses with greater passenger capacity.
Tim Cook has stated on more than one occasion that autonomous driving systems are the mother of all AI problemsAlthough as Siri has evolved, it seems that the Artificial Intelligence problem also affects Apple's virtual assistant.
