What if Apple designed a car?

On 20-Apr-2007, at 09:59, Adam C. Engst wrote:
> The car discussion I inadvertently started got me thinking - what
> would a car designed by Apple look and work like?

Well, first off, it would do a lot of things for you. Like Park
itself. It would, of course, have all the latest technology in it,
like GPS.

And, despite the whining on the other thread, it would probably not
have an ignition switch but rather start up when you buckled your
belt. Be honest, this sounds just like something Apple would do.

"Yeah, our mice have no buttons and our cars have no ignitions or
steering wheels, so there."

You'd get in the car, buckle up, and the car would say to itself,
"Hey, it's 6:18am" and would load up your office/workplace in the
GPS. Then it would check the traffic reports and plot the best
course, going by your favorite coffee drive-through on the way, of
course.

The car would lock itself when you weren't in it.

It would sync with OS X's calendar so it knew where you needed to go.
It would also hold all your music and have access to your video
library for your passengers, but not via those silly 5" screens.
Instead, it would use 'glasses' that would project a virtual 60"
screen for the wearer.

Your iPhone and iPod would be fully integrated into the car, naturally.

The seats would be designed to be crash safe in any position, even
reclined in a sleeping position.

It would be a lot smaller than a 'regular' car, use less gas, and go
at least as fast (Sorta like a Smart ForFour).

It would also likely have something radically different, like touch
controls for everything and a joystick to steer with instead of a
steering wheel, just to be really different.

Its various sensors would work to try to make the drive as safe as
possible, monitoring road conditions, weather alerts, traffic
reports, etc.

It would have proximity sensors on the front and rear that could tell
you to within a cm how close you were to obstructions. These sensors
would be good enough that the car could do a reasonable job of
keeping you on the road and in your lane without your steering, but
not good enough to self-navigate turns. Apple would develop a new
paint for striping streets that would allow cars to completely drive
themselves, but no one would use it because it costs twice as much as
regular paint. People will drive to Cupertino just to be able to nap
in their cars while they drive around the city.

Someone will try to drive from Dallas to Paris, TX and end up in New
York City parked on a dock. They will blame Apple.

It would be any color you wanted, as long as that was white or
brushed aluminum. A later model would come in 5 colors.

Oh, and there would not be a new model every year.

Like everyone has noticed, a Toyota Prius is pretty much the closest thing
to an iCar.

Keyless driving and entry, the car is more software than hardware, has
built-in touchscreen geekware/GPS, the new versions in Japan parallel-park
themselves, in a pinch you can use it as a UPS, <http://www.priups.com>,
and, holy cow, it easily gets 40 miles to the gallon -- almost as many as a
good European diesel hatchback does.

;-).

With a continuously variable "automatic" transmission, I think of the Prius
as a Luxo-Barge for tree-huggers, the principal, um, "luxury" being
superfluous, or at least expensive, efficiency. It's pretty "torque-y",
though, foot to the floor, with the electric motor as the primary source of
locomotion at lower speeds. For the first few hundred yards, at least. From
a cold start, I can almost imagine myself behind the wheel of my mom's
brand-new 1975 Rocket 350 four-barrel Sandstone two-tone Olds Cutlass
Supreme automatic. Too bad you can't do neutral drops in a Prius, or I
might get another drag-racing ticket like I did on my 16th birthday...


To keep it at least homeopathically topical, I don't really expect a
once-and future iCar to be put together at an existing business, especially
on this side of the pond.

There are actual Prius hackers out
there,<http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/Prius_Technical_Stuff/>, and, in
the UK at least, you can build a car from scratch, and actually sell it to
the public without millions of VC-cash to pay the lawyers and regulators
when you've built it, sans the automobile red-tape raj that exists here in
the US. The Ariel Atom comes to mind, for instance. Very whizzy little car.
Emphasis on whizzy. And you get a free lunch every drive, just pick the
bugs out of your teeth. (ewwwww...)


Maybe some East-Anglian or Midlands Woz will gin up the first breadboards
for an iCar, and quit, say, Astin-Martin, or Lotus, to build it -- if
there's another Jobs.uk to Svengali it into existence.


Cheers,
RAH
Who, in case you wonder how he knows so much about Prii (plural) while
damning it with faint praise, is an anarchocapitalist Republican married to
a liberal Democrat who owns one.

On 20-Apr-2007, at 09:59, Adam C. Engst wrote:
> The car discussion I inadvertently started got me thinking - what
> would a car designed by Apple look and work like?

Well, first off, it would do a lot of things for you. Like Park
itself. It would, of course, have all the latest technology in it,
like GPS.

And, despite the whining on the other thread, it would probably not
have an ignition switch but rather start up when you buckled your
belt. Be honest, this sounds just like something Apple would do.

"Yeah, our mice have no buttons and our cars have no ignitions or
steering wheels, so there."

You'd get in the car, buckle up, and the car would say to itself,
"Hey, it's 6:18am" and would load up your office/workplace in the
GPS. Then it would check the traffic reports and plot the best
course, going by your favorite coffee drive-through on the way, of
course.

The car would lock itself when you weren't in it.

It would sync with OS X's calendar so it knew where you needed to go.
It would also hold all your music and have access to your video
library for your passengers, but not via those silly 5" screens.
Instead, it would use 'glasses' that would project a virtual 60"
screen for the wearer.

Your iPhone and iPod would be fully integrated into the car, naturally.

The seats would be designed to be crash safe in any position, even
reclined in a sleeping position.

It would be a lot smaller than a 'regular' car, use less gas, and go
at least as fast (Sorta like a Smart ForFour).

It would also likely have something radically different, like touch
controls for everything and a joystick to steer with instead of a
steering wheel, just to be really different.

Its various sensors would work to try to make the drive as safe as
possible, monitoring road conditions, weather alerts, traffic
reports, etc.

It would have proximity sensors on the front and rear that could tell
you to within a cm how close you were to obstructions. These sensors
would be good enough that the car could do a reasonable job of
keeping you on the road and in your lane without your steering, but
not good enough to self-navigate turns. Apple would develop a new
paint for striping streets that would allow cars to completely drive
themselves, but no one would use it because it costs twice as much as
regular paint. People will drive to Cupertino just to be able to nap
in their cars while they drive around the city.

Someone will try to drive from Dallas to Paris, TX and end up in New
York City parked on a dock. They will blame Apple.

It would be any color you wanted, as long as that was white or
brushed aluminum. A later model would come in 5 colors.

Oh, and there would not be a new model every year.

> The car discussion I inadvertently started got me thinking - what
> would a car designed by Apple look and work like?

They would only sell a left-hand drive version worldwide, claiming
their internationalisation efforts were sufficient by simply
advertising in local languages (and spellings). The billions of
people in right-hand drive countries will just have to learn that
Apple's way is the correct way. ;-)

What I'd be more interested in is what an Apple-designed bicycle
would be like... and that would tie in well to the spirit of the
original Mac.

_________________
=> Jolin

At 8:59 AM -0700 4/20/07, Adam C. Engst wrote:
>I've only jokingly ever suggested that Apple should build the iCar,

Imagine the field day Greenpeace would have then... ;-)

... and it would never remember how you left the seats, or any other
adjustable item, from one day to the next.

:-)

Dave

--On April 20, 2007 12:09:35 PM -0700 Google Kreme <gkremegmail.com> wrote:
> Oh, and there would not be a new model every year.

And rumors about the new model every 10 minutes.

an hour after release someone will have posted instructions on how to drop
out the Apple supplied engine and drop in the engine from a Shelby Mustang.

It would be risky and revolutionary and push the envelope, like the
newton, magneto-optical drives (the NeXt), dropping the floppy drive. It
would be universally ridiculed by industry pundits, but the public would
buy into it (Mac OS9 vs. DOS, Original iMac). It may fail, or it may
spark a cultural revolution (iPod). It would be 'properly sized' (Apple
TV vs. TiVo, iPod shuffle, Mac-Mini) and only contain the features you
need, and be vertically integrated into your life ala the
iPod/iTunes/iMovie/iDVD -- Apple would control both the horizontal and the
vertical.

By properly-sized, take a look around you the next time you go driving --
most cars are 1/4 _or less_ full (ie, a 4 passenger car with only one
driver). That's horribly inefficient, lugging around 2-3 tons to deliver
a 100-200 lb. payload. By features you REALLY need, most Americans drive
30 miles or less a day, with an average speed of around 35 miles, with
single occupancy, yet we've been conditioned to believe we need vehicle
that can take us (and 8 of our closest friends or cargo) 300 miles per
fill-up. That's also highly inefficient. Apple would drop this like
dropping (or not having) radio in the iPod. Yes, it'd be nice, but it's
not what most people would use on a daily basis.

You wouldn't need standard anti-collision protection because when you're
driving an Apple, you simply wouldn't need it. In fact, if you TRIED to
use anti-collision from 3rd parties, it would cause more problems than its
worth (ala Virex).

And the kicker is we'd have wonderfully sarcastic commercials that would
start "Hi! I'm an iCar" "and I'm an H3"...

In fact this is one of the first things I saw when I saw the Twike --
"This is how Apple would design a car, if Apple made cars." It's not
completely up to Apple standards user-interface wise (it does have a
computer software base, as it's an electric car -- so you can tweak it for
sport performance acceleration or economy-mode, but it's made by german
engineers -- if you've ever tried to figure out which button to press to
roll down a window in a Mercedes, you know what I mean by that).

It does have revolutionary concepts -- it's driven 'by joystick'. It had
regen-brakes before the Prius came out. With the exception of the
anti-collision allusion it's spot-on at correcting the defficiencies
listed aboue. It has a 6-to-1 vehicle weight to payload ratio (5-600
pound vehicle). It's small (4' x 8' x 4') footprint. It goes 80 miles
per charge at a max on-the-flat speed of 55mph. It's damn cute as well as
butt-ugly at the same time (ala Dalmation iMac). It sticks out and draws
attention to itself by just being (Is that Apple GLOWING on the back of
that laptop screen?). And kids flock to it.

And they've had Apple-esque struggles. It's now made by a small company
in Germany (originally Swiss design) that has a great product that's hard
to get but worth it (I've ridden in a 1998 model down Lincoln Avenue in
Chicago. It was swhueeet! We ran the posted speed limit, and gave room
for 2 lanes of traffic to pass... but they wouldn't cuz they wanted to
look at the vehicle and there were TONS of thumbs-up). Kinda like
back-in-the-day before the Internet where finding software for the Mac was
difficult. They, like Apple, just need to reach the Tipping Point.

M

On 22/4/2007 6:30 PM, "Google Kreme" <gkremegmail.com> spake thus:

> Apple would develop a new paint for striping streets that would allow cars to
> completely drive themselves [...]

<http://www.retrofuture.com/dreamcars.html>

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

If Apple designed a car...

... it would look fabulous until you touched it, then it would look like
a TV screen in a mental ward no matter how hard you tried to clean it.

Ooops! No. You meant an Apple Computer Car, not an Apple iPod car, okay,...

If Apple designed a car...

...I'd buy it and wait a year for Adobe to come out with an air
conditioner and a radio for it.

: )

Sigurado ako maganda yung kotse na yun. and malamang kulay puti! tama? (I am sure that it will be a nice car. And I am pretty sure that it will be white! Right?)

As for color, I think Bondi Blue would look kinda nice on my MAC Mobile!

Because it was only a matter of time before someone posted it:

What if Microsoft designed a car?

Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new
car.
Occasionally your car would just die on the highway for no reason. Accept
this, restart and drive on.

Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause the car to stop and fail to
restart. You'd have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you'd
just accept this too.

You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought "Car
95" or "Car NT". But then you'd have to buy more seats.

Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was twice as
reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive - but it would only run
on five percent of the roads.

The oil, engine, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced with a
single "General Car Fault" light.

People would get excited about "new" features in Microsoft cars, forgetting
completely that they had been available in other cars for years.

We'd all have to switch to Microsoft gas and auto fluids.

New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.

The airbag system would say, "Are you sure?" before going off.

If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened.

Microsoft wouldn't build their own engines, but form a cartel with their
engine suppliers. The engine would be a side-valve design so you could still
use Model T Ford parts on it.

Microsoft cars would have a special radio/cassette player which would only
be able to listen to Microsoft FM and play Microsoft cassettes.

Microsoft would do well, because even though they don't own any roads, all
road manufacturers would give away Microsoft cars for free!

If you couldn't afford to buy a new car, you could borrow your friend's and
copy it.

Whenever you bought a car, you would have to reorganize the ignition a few
days until it worked.

You would need an upgrade to run cars on a highway next to each other.


You know it was only a matter of time...
Steve

On 25/4/2007 12:23 AM, "Big Steve" <bigstevemactampabay.rr.com> spake thus:

> The oil, engine, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced with a
> single "General Car Fault" light.

That reminds me of the following gem that I had filed away:

'Ken Thompson [co-creator of Unix] has an automobile which he helped design.
Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any
of the numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the
driver makes any mistake, a giant "?" lights up in the center of the
dashboard. "The experienced driver", he says, "will usually know what's
wrong."'

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

On Apr 20, 2007, at 08:59 AM, Adam C. Engst wrote:

> Of course, it would have to run Mac OS X, which would need to be
> even more reliable than it currently is. :) And unless design
> trends changed, it would be glaringly white, slick black, or
> brushed aluminum.

Marty: "Doc, you built a time machine...out of an iCar?!"

--
Chris Page - Computer Professional

"That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its
development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no
improvements of a radical nature have been introduced." (Scientific
American January 2, 1909).

   --John

Ummmmm.

Subaru Outback running OS-X

The ultimate machine?

OK, almost, but it does have....

Ignition coordinated sleep-wake smart power supply separate driver/passenger "entertainment zones" 7" wide touchscreen in dash Mac Mini Core duo running apple apps (i-whatever you want) PLUS Skype over vodem or wifi, whatever is easier at the time GPS mapping and tracking Cellphone handsfree answering and text reading

Whatever else I need it to run. MS Office, iChat, Google earth, internet browser etc..

Built in USB hub in the centre armrest

Bluetooth (of course)

Front Row (of course) - 15000 songs, 200 movies, 1500 photos at present

And guess what?

It IS brushed aluminium ( well metallic grey anyway)

Hmmmmm.. when WILL apple build a car?

Peace

(PS. Writen from the car!)