Apple expands its fleet of self-driving cars in California

Keep your eyes peeled for a white Lexus SUV with a weird robotic crown on its head in Silicon Valley.

Apple has expanded its autonomous driving fleet from three last year to 27 in early 2018, by registering 24 more Lexus RX450h sport-utility vehicles with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

Apple has been beefing up its self-driving car inventory since last July, according to the Verge. Apple added two in July, seven in October, two in November, six in December and seven in January, the Verge reported.

Apple’s path to self-driving cars has been a rocky one. In 2014, media reports revealed Apple’s then-secret operation to build a self-driving car called Project Titan. However, by 2016, Project Titan’s wheels began to fall off, as hundreds of employees were reassigned, laid off or left to join other competitors.

In April 2017, Apple received its official permit from the California DMV to operate self-driving test cars on its roads. Two months later, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company was focusing more on developing the autonomous-driving software rather than building a self-driving car from scratch.

“We’re focusing on autonomous systems, and clearly one purpose of autonomous systems is self-driving cars,” said Cook in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose in June. “There are others, and we sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects. It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on.”

In October, MacCallister Higgins, a co-founder of a self-driving startup called Voyage, caught Apple’s self-driving white Lexus in the wild — controlled by the crown equipped with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors and radars to detect objects in its vicinity — in the South Bay.

But if Apple is working on an AI-based autonomous-driving software, then testing with 27 cars is not enough, said Tasha Keeney, an autonomous-cars analyst at the New York City-based research company ARK Invest.

“When you are developing autonomous cars, scale really matters,” said Keeney. “Most companies are using machine-learning techniques which get better as more data get fed into them. And if you think about 27 vehicles, that’s not a lot.”Apple’s fleet is no match for Waymo’s, a Google-owned self-driving car company. Waymo is already testing vehicles in six different states, including with 600 Chrysler vans in Phoenix and Detroit, according to Bloomberg. Earlier this month, a Waymo self-driving car was spotted roaming the streets of San Francisco.

Keeney also pointed to Tesla as a possible wild card in the race for self-driving cars, as Tesla collects data for its machine-learning software from the thousands of cars it sold to customers.

As Apple appears to be lagging behind, Keeney recommended a slight pivot for Apple from building self-driving software to providing better infotainment experience for drivers who no longer have to keep their eyes focused on the road at all times.

“If Apple are planning to build software to make cars drive, they are at least two years behind Waymo and others,” said Keeney. “But right now, if you think of infotainment in cars, it’s limited to very basic functions. That space can become much more important when the drivers get time freed up.”