Apple Car rumored to run new custom OS to control all aspects of driving

M68000 said:

crowley said:
Definitely won't be an early adopter on this.  Apple make pretty good consumer operating systems, but not nearly good enough that I'd trust them with my life driving down a high speed roadway.

Ironically,  just heard radio news about some Tesla driver doing 83mph on freeway and the car locked up or shut down because of computer glitch.  He was able to eventually stop with brakes but had car towed to be looked at.    Having too much computer “control” can be a bad thing.  Cars just keep getting more and more reliant on computers.  There has to be a balance,  I guess I will take heat for these comments but that’s how I feel. 

The use of 'computers' has probably saved far more lives than it has cost and computers (chips) have been decisive on cars for decades now.

In its heyday, Motorola claimed that its embedded PowerPC chips were on around half of the ABS systems on cars worldwide. 

The Tesla situation you described happened in a non-autonomous car (Seat Leon) I was in over 10 years ago.

It was speeding down the motorway when a beep was heard, the steering stiffened and all the driver could do was 'guide' it through three lanes to the hard shoulder where it simply switched off.

We were lucky there weren't any other cars in those lanes we crossed. 

It was a pretty scary moment but the garage said nothing had been registered on the onboard computer.

We never knew what caused it and the car started normally after the driver had recovered from the scare.

It is very unlikely that Apple is going to re-invent the wheel with regards to on board software. It will probably licence existing solutions and tie it all together at the front end. 

Existing solutions and OS options are already shipping which do this on 'autonomous' cars. Basically adding 'sensing' capabilities and communications capabilities to the myriad of computing processes that have been around for decades. 

It requires some serious computing power within the vehicle in the form of 'mobile data centers' and low latency communications with cloud, road infrastructure and other vehicles but all this is already shipping. 

One of the biggest hurdles will be deciding which communications technologies win out in the 'vehicle to everything' stakes but current solutions can, in theory, be updated to handle that.