Despite little information, Apple and Google lead at German auto show
Apple and Google have yet to announce any plans of mass-producing self-driving cars, but that hasn鈥檛 stopped them from stealing the show among international automakers.聽
鈥淭he mere knowledge that Apple has a team of several hundred people working on car designs this week at the Frankfurt International Motor Show,鈥� wrote The New York Times. 鈥淎long with Google, Apple has focused the minds of auto executives on the challenge posed by new technologies that have the potential to disrupt traditional auto industry hierarchies.鈥澛�
While buzz at the conference is usually centered on horsepower and torque, this year smart cars are all the rage, reports the Times.
Google has been making headlines since testing its autonomous cars in public. A particular highlight came this summer as it was involved in an accident with another car in Mountain View, California, 海角大神 reported.
And for the past year, Apple has been hiring engineers left and right for its secret electric car project, known only as Titan, according to the Monitor. Bloomberg reported earlier this year that the company wouldn鈥檛 begin production .
But a new report from The Guardian on Friday shows that Apple executives met with officials from California鈥檚 Department of Motor Vehicles last month, in a move
While DMV officials declined to elaborate beyond that statement, the meeting suggests that the vehicle 鈥渋s almost ready for public view,鈥� wrote the newspaper.
Given all the secrecy, one might ask: What鈥檚 all the fuss about? For automakers, it鈥檚 mostly according to the Times.
While John Krafcik, who heads up Google鈥檚 self-driving car program, has that the company has plans of becoming a car manufacturer, concerns continue to swirl:
As cars increasingly become rolling software platforms, Apple and Google have depths of tech expertise that the carmakers would have trouble duplicating. And those Silicon Valley companies have financial resources that dwarf those of even behemoth companies like Daimler and Volkswagen 鈥�
The main risk for carmakers is probably not so much that an Apple car would destroy Mercedes-Benz or BMW the way the iPhone gutted Nokia, the Finnish company that was once the world鈥檚 largest maker of mobile phones. Rather, the risk is that Apple and Google would turn the carmakers into mere hardware makers 鈥� and hog the profit.
