Thoughts on Apple Car

Jan 25, 2018

This summer my girlfriend and I went hiking here, it is a wonderful place and we spent days walking up and down the mountains. As much as it was marvelous, it was tiring: by the end of the day, even those last few kilometers to reach the parking lot where we had left the car that morning seemed to be infinitely long. That's when I began making a little joke: every time I felt tired - even if I was among hight chains of mountains, hundreds of meters above sea level, I would raise my wrist, bring the (not Apple)watch to the mouth and say "Car, come and get me"

A future not too distant

Autonomous driving cars are here already and it doesn't take a magician to guess they will be everywhere in short years. Tesla has pioneered the way building the car altogether and others are following. Apple too has showed interest in the field: Tim Cooked said autonomous driving is "the mother of all AI projects" and rumors about a "Project Titan" have been around for few years now.
What seems most probable at this point, is for Apple to make a platform of self driving sensors and AI software that can be integrated on cars made by industrial partners... shall we call it BMW Razr? For the sake of this article, let's give the autonomous driving project for granted and begin to imagine on how it will be shaped.
In a clear conflict of interests I'm going to speculate on how a personal self driving car could be. Maybe the future will be populated by shared cars, but in the cities I live there aren't so many people to sustain such model and, beside that, I'd love to keep on having my car to go around in the weekends. I'd rather see public transportation to the highest power than hundreds of shared cars driving from one passenger to the next, but I might be wrong on this point.

It's the ecosystem baby

Making autonomous driving car surely takes much effort, much much effort, but what is of an autonomous car if it isn't smart enough to comunicate with the other smart things we'll have everywhere in our houses in few years? If I am to be able to say "Car, come and get me" I need a wrist device that listens to me and can deliver my message to the car in a secure way so that the car comes and gets me, not somebody else who intercepted the message. I need a door garage that opens at need to let the car out and an efficient mapping system that gets the car where I am avoiding jams or closed roads. I need to have an ecosystem of devices that communicate in a secure manner, that understand each other and cooperate to fulfill my commands.
Apple has already moved in this directions many years ago, setting the foundations for this scenario to work just fine. iPhones and Apple Watches are devices you trust and where you keep sensitive informations with no much worries, iMessage is a robust and secure way to deliver messages that are encrypted end-to-end. Homekit is the home protocol Apple made so that smart appliances makers could focus on what they do best and leverage on Apple's technology to make their products communicative with one another. Last in order of appearance, but not least for importance, HomePod is finally here to serve, among other nice things, as an always-on Homekit hub to control this orchestra of devices.

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