Apple’s Self-Driving Car

On Nov. 18, Apple announced that it is working on a self-driving car with no steering wheel or pedals, set to be released in 2025. Bloomberg reports that Apple recently hit a milestone with self-driving technology. 

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there have been many attempts to create a self-driving car. The first was created in 1925 by Francis Houdina, and was considered “radio-controlled.” The trend continued when Norman Bel Geddes created the first self-driving car to be guided by radio-controlled electromagnetic fields. In 1958, an autonomous car was released in Nebraska through General Motors. John McCarthy, an American mathematician and scientist who pioneered Artificial Intelligence, wrote a paper in 1969 about the technology behind these cars. By the early 2000s, Toyota’s Prius hybrid and several other car companies incorporated some of this technology into features such as backup cameras and parallel-parking aids. Tesla added an autopilot feature, and Google released their self-driving car in 2020 after over a decade of work.

Apple is stepping out of its niche of phones and computers to join these companies to develop an autonomous car. While people can already use Apple-brand phones to control music, directions and make phone calls from their car, its driverless car aims to add safety features, which can assuage fears after reports of accidents with driverless cars.Although Silicon Valley predicted a world full of self-driving cars by 2021, this vision hasn’t come true. Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company, discovered that distractions from soap bubbles to springtime flowers can potentially cause accidents for autonomous cars. With this in mind, it makes sense that we haven’t managed to create a fully functioning self-driving car in the century that the technology has existed. As no such market exists, Apple has the potential to create groundbreaking technology.

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Photo Caption: An Apple store in New York

Photo Credit: Pixabay