• chevron_right

      After a decade of stops and starts, Apple kills its electric car project

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 27 February - 21:28

    An enormous ring-shaped building on a green campus.

    Enlarge / Apple's global headquarters in Cupertino, California. (credit: Sam Hall/Bloomberg via Getty Images )

    After 10 years of development, multiple changes in direction and leadership, and a plethora of leaks, Apple has reportedly ended work on its electric car project. According to a report in Bloomberg , the company is shifting some of the staff to work on generative AI projects within the company and planning layoffs for some others.

    Internally dubbed Project Titan, the long-in-development car would have ideally had a luxurious, limo-like interior, robust self-driving capabilities, and at least a $100,000 price tag. However, the ambition of the project was drawn down with time. For example, it was once planned to have Level 4 self-driving capabilities, but that was scaled back to Level 2+.

    Delays had pushed the car (on which work initially began way back in 2014) to a target release date of 2028. Now it won't be released at all.

    Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

    https://upload.31337.one:5281/upload/645ddf21-172e-4647-ad85-23f9894183f7/ev6.webp

    Couldn't find my post from the end of march anymore, so here it is. It's a Kia EV6, a #BEV - the only black one with long-range pack and heat pump I could find, after looking for weeks. Ordering one from a dealer in Sweden would have taken more than a year; fortunately a dealer in Cologne had one ready for pickup from a guy who ordered but didn't want to wait anymore. In just the last few months I have saved about ~2000€ in gas, and most of the time I'm driving for free now.

    Now that Saudi Arabia has allowed women to drive just as cars are becoming A.I. driverless (Nelson Muntz, "Ha Ha"), its time to put Movim into a carputer. One of the uses for this is to have the XMPP video conferencing streaming your dashcam footage to your home (or other remote location), probably to be captured in a stream to a remote home-computer maybe via FOSS software similar to OBS or miracast (even though the local carputer might be set up to be a video-recording 'blackbox' in the car itself too).

    Carputer

    It basically doesn't matter if Movim video-conferencing only does a video-call via just two computers linked in peer-to-peer at the moment. The carputer could have several cameras "mixed" into say 4 way split screen (like diddykong-racing or goldeneye 4-player on the N64 resembles). The 4 cameras could point out the windows in a Front, Back, Left and Right configuration (or something similar).

    Of course, Movim in an HTPC could also have similar functionality. To build the carputer, it would be perfectly possible to choose either a MITX mainboard or to gut-out a laptop. The processing should be fine, as long as a computer is capable of playing Blu-Ray (usually dual-core 1.6Ghz with zacate or AMD graphics APU is fine, but double it to a rasperry-pi3bplus quad core of a 3GHz dual-core to be on the safe side and a little virtualisation ability might help, and future 3D collada support could capture physics from cameras acting as stereoscopic). Having opengl4.4 is nice but if you need opencl, something like a a6-6400k APU gives opencl 1.2 but an AMD 7400k gives opencl2.0 on the apu. Power efficient equivalents would need to be considered as alternatives. A 12volt car stereo can be powered from a modified xbox360 psu at home, if you want an htpc to match the carputer.

    Fitting the carputer into a car-stereo bay so a DVDRW is included would be tidy and it also means, if a network fails, you could burn two 1GB DVD-R 8cm discs and pop them in a standard-letter-size (110 x 220 mm) envelope with a first class stamp to friends or family at a nearby postbox, so that within a day or three, at least some footage can get to them (and maybe have a folded Return Address SAE inside the envelope too). Or have the computer installed somewhere in the car it won't get stolen, and the DVDRW drive could simply be connected by a long cable to the car-stereo bay. If the carputer is running Kodi many touchscreen options exist and so can voice-activation.

    There is a myth that women drivers are safer drivers. The truth is, men drive more. The self-heating tin of all-day-breakfast exists because of men drivers. Necessity is the mother of invention, and hunger is the brother of indigestion. It is part of men in careers involving driving, as business not just residential. The majority of accidents happen 2 minutes from home. The flooding of women onto the roads as drivers is really just a quantitative easing, creating a hyperinflation of drivers. It is a way to launder funny money. Like alcohol-prohibition era America, more rules paves the way for more corruption. All roads lead to Rome, and when in Rome, the fall of Rome is by driving drunk on girl-powah. That'll put lead in your pencil. When women hold up half the sky, they take up your braking-distance. Women destroyed the environment in creating more roads by exceeding the capacity of those roads already existing. Carpooling spreads diseases. Arguing against it gets car companies and insurers calling you a male chauffeurnist. So with the abundance of falsehoods pre-emptively trying to find men autoguilty, don't get caught out by the social-distancing cameras that only put A.I. red-boxes around the chosen few, and don't get caught out by the establishment's electronic-line-judge or their equivalents to "HawkEye Cyclops" where corruption in sport is in court, found to be rigged. Driving is a sport, and could we be surprised if they'd employ their same tactics there on the main road? Speed cameras have been questioned in the past. Create your own data and have your own specialists, friends and back-ups at hand.

    Movim RSS could keep you abreast of new changes on a road before the mainstream media or traffic reports get the information.

    An automatic message over the XMPP chatroom or conferencing could send a message and a hash file of the video file you make such as a magnet link to a torrent. When the airbag goes off, a torrent is seeded, and an (atom) RSS published. War-driving with your IPFS could also be used, and could be a mobile Movim Pod. With that, finding driving routes via a route-finder can be done in a way that finds today's best war-driving route if the journey is tweaked, so maybe even coverage is mapped when microwave or other wireless comms are affected by weather or impaired communications masts.

    And if all else fails, make your carputer's A.I. brain one of them #MGTOW wuvbots and you can just call anybody who disagrees with you sexist. If she crashes, she is the primary victim of wardriving for she is the one left behind.