We’ve come down pretty hard on Apple in the past for building its spaceship headquarters in about the least-transit-friendly place possible. But what the company may be planning with fleets of autonomous vehicles may put the company back in our good graces. And it just may be the way AVs have to be introduced to the public in order to keep us from hitting AV traffic armageddon right from the very start.
Apple’s first real-world use of some of the autonomous driving technology it’s working on could be a self-driving shuttle, according to a new report from The New York Times. The Times’ detailed progress (and some missteps) in Apple’s self-driving car ambitions, and one of those which still seems on track is a plan to create an autonomous shuttle to ferry employees from one part of its sprawling campus to another.
Other companies are targeting exactly this kind of inter- and intra-campus fleet service as the low-hanging fruit of autonomy, and as a way to test technology and gather data in preparation for more ambitious and wide scale public service launches. Startup May Mobility, which I profiled just this week and which graduated from the most recent Y Combinator accelerator class, is specifically working on this, for example, because it’s a far more technically achievable goal in the near term.