Apple Acknowledges Its Investment In Building Self-Driving Vehicles

Apple Acknowledges Its Investment In Building Self-Driving Vehicles

Apple has finally answered the long travelling rumors in the technology world suggesting the tech giant was spending heavy amount in building automated cars and plans to bring it on roads very soon. Last week in a letter to the US transport regulators, the company has confirmed its investment in producing self-driving vehicles, and has put light on the purposes for attempting something new and challenging after bringing a revolution in mobile phones. Incredibly, it’s first time when the company has officially acknowledged its new attempt saying it has invested in a self-driving car production.

Apple is very excited about the future of automated system in several fields that includes transportation. It believes that there will be significant benefits of automated vehicle on societies after its release.

Though there were lots of rumors being circulated suggesting Apple’s plans for a self-driving car, it hasn’t publicly disclosed what it was having in mind for long. On the other hand, Ford – the company itself has revealed its plans of bringing self-driving vehicles on the road before the year of 2021. The spokesman for the company says Ford was working on the same nuts and bolts that Apple is making one now. Apple’s name already exists as a registered firm on many online domains that are related to automobile industry which also include apple and apple.car.

On the other hand, a company representative for Apple says, its letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is endorsed with company’s huge investment in machine learning as well as autonomous system. In addition, the company’s note to NHTSA suggests that Apple wants to help describe the most excellent practices in the manufacturing.

The aforementioned letter consists of five lengthy pages while Mr. Steve Kenner who is the director of product integrity at Apple and is the writer of this letter, has urged the regulator for not introducing so many rules while testing the self-driving cars. He also wrote the organization should treat established companies and new entrants in the same way.  Furthermore, the letter also proposed that manufacturers in the industry should be sharing data from all kind of crashes and near-misses for building a more detailed image than the one a manufacturer could manage at its own and can make the design of enhanced systems.

Meanwhile the letter emphasized on not to compromise on a person’s privacy when sharing such kind of data. Moreover, it also makes it apparent that both the regulators and the industry must address the challenges of privacy that are linked with assembling, using and sharing of automated vehicle’s data. It says this could be done in the collaboration with privacy experts who belong outside of the automotive industry.

Besides Ford and Apple, Google is counting itself among the companies that are already in trail process of self-driving vehicles on the roads. Tesla, the car manufacturer made the announcement in October that all new vehicles that the company is now making will be having the hardware setup to drive in their own way.  While in the United Kingdom, an autonomous car was brought to roads in Milton Keynes in last couple of months with additional testing in London.

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