With the current bearish frequency, do we overestimate Apple's ability to build cars?

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Car manufacturing is regarded as a key measure for Apple to further achieve market value breakthroughs, and under Apple's historical record, the industry is expected that Apple car manufacturing will be highly integrated with hardware, software and services, subverting the current automotive industry and changing the rules of the game again.

But from a realistic point of view, Apple's car manufacturing seems to be at the current stage of bearish frequency - intensive personnel turmoil, uncertain car-making strategy, challenged supply chain strong position, and Tesla has set the de facto standard for electric vehicles.

Under the strong contrast between the high expectations in the industry and the actual situation, people can't help but wonder: Are we overestimating Apple's car-making ability under the survivor bias?

First, the highly volatile car management team

For seven years since Apple's "Project Titan" program, members of Apple's auto management team have been in high turmoil.

Looking at the Timeline of Apple's car manufacturing, it can be found that the core leaders of Apple's car management team have come to the fourth generation of management led by John Giannandrea, Apple's vice president of machine learning, and the three leaders in front of it are Steve Zadesky, the leader of the original iPod team, Bob Mansfield, Apple's chief hardware engineer, and Doug Field, the former tesla senior vice president of engineering.

However, the turmoil in Apple's car management team is not only reflected in the frequent turnover of core leaders, but also in the continuous departure of leaders of many sub-engineering business lines.

The latest example is Joe Bass, Apple's head of automotive software engineering, who, after seven years at Apple, joined Meta as director of project management for mixed reality technology. Although this is jokingly called the latest example of "car building has no meta-universe appeal".

But for Apple, it may be another example of the poor progress of its car-making plans. After all, according to comprehensive industry reports, before Joe Bass left, the big bulls in the industry who left Apple's automotive business line included Urlich Kranz, the former BMW electric vehicle research and development Urlich Kranz, the chief engineer of the radar system of the Apple car project, the former Tesla software director CJ Moore, the engineering manager of the battery system department of the Apple car project, Alex Clarabut, the hardware engineering manager Stephen Spiteri, As well as Dave Scott, who led the automotive-related robotics team, Jaime Waydo, who led the safety and regulation team for self-driving cars, and Benjamin Lyon, who helped Apple create its original automotive team.

The successive departure of these big cattle in the industry is not a small loss for Apple's car-making plan.

In just seven years, Apple's car-making plan has experienced four leaders taking office, and the industry's big bulls who originally joined Apple's car-making plan have frequently left. This is probably difficult to say normal for any company, let alone Apple, which has always had a relatively stable personnel.

Second, the uncertain route of car building

The reason why apple car management team turnover is so frequent may be Apple's indecisiveness on the road to car building.

In fact, the industry has previously reported that within Apple, there is no unified conclusion on whether to build a vehicle to achieve soft and hard integration or focus on the research and development of automatic driving systems. The change of the previous three leaders of Apple's car-making team can be said to be a direct embodiment of Apple's continuous swing in its car-making strategy.

For example, during the leadership of Bob Mansfield, Apple's chief hardware engineer, Bob set the goal of Apple's car to build an autonomous driving system; but after Apple poached the former Tesla senior vice president of engineering, Doug Field, it adjusted the team's research and development direction to the whole vehicle research and development; and now Apple has Apple's vice president of machine learning John Giannandrea lead the department, which may indicate most of the current work of Apple's car project. Still in terms of autonomous driving systems.

Of course, under the general trend of "software-defined cars", Apple's continuous strengthening of research and development in software (autonomous driving systems) is understandable, but this unsustainability of the research and development direction reflected through leadership is equivalent to no reassurance for the R & D personnel of related business lines.

After all, even Cook's statement on the matter of car building seems to be in flux – he told Bloomberg in 2017 that autonomous driving is "the mother of all artificial intelligence projects" and "a core technology that we think is very important". But by 2021, in an interview with sway, the U.S. tech podcast Sway, Cook, while still emphasizing the importance of autonomous driving, also said that Apple "likes to integrate hardware, software and services and find their intersections." Apple likes to have core technologies related to this... They've worked on a lot of products in-house, and while many of them haven't seen the light yet, that doesn't mean they won't be released. ”

Third, the challenged supply chain is in a strong position

In the era of smart phones, Apple has this unparalleled supply chain dominance, many suppliers are proud to be Apple suppliers, in fact, to catch up with Apple suppliers, but also let countless manufacturers take off the stock price. This strong position in the supply chain allows Apple to focus only on design and development, while handing over hardware production to the foundry.

In the auto business, Apple also wants to copy the same way of playing, but from the perspective of realistic feedback, the industry does not seem to be willing to only do apple car foundries.

For example, in the manufacture of complete vehicles: Previously, the industry rumored that Apple intends to cooperate with Hyundai or Volkswagen to entrust its car manufacturing to these manufacturers with rich experience in automobile manufacturing, but the result is that Hyundai is worried about the impact of its own electric vehicle project, and negotiations with Apple have reached an impasse; Volkswagen CEO Diess also said that Volkswagen, as europe's largest traditional car manufacturer, will not be downgraded to a contract manufacturer of a technology company because of Apple.

Another example is in the choice of power battery suppliers, Apple wants to reach cooperation with BYD and Ningde Times, but under the condition that Apple expects the two battery suppliers to form a special team for themselves and build a local exclusive factory in the United States. BYD and the Ningde era vetoed Apple's plan, and the negotiations reached an impasse, forcing Apple to turn its attention to Panasonic.

In this way, the reality that shows may be that Apple was once in the era of calling for wind and rain in the smartphone supply chain, which may have passed, and Apple's strength in the supply chain has not been accepted by players in the automotive industry market.

Fourth, Tesla has set the de facto standard for electric vehicles

The above-mentioned negative factors are only based on apple itself at present, and do not take into account the current market reality.

From a realistic point of view, the current overall automobile market is already a large number of players, and these players have gone through a round of market survival of the baptism, each of them are good players, of which Tesla has become the current intelligent electric vehicle market factual evaluation standard, its status and iPhone in the smartphone market, can be described as the same.

In this reality, the automotive products launched by Apple in the future will inevitably be pulled by the market to compete with Tesla, but there are still many questions about how Apple Cars will cross the hurdle set up by Tesla.

One of the major realities is that the current evaluation criteria for electric smart cars have been settled on the ability of automatic driving, after Tianfeng International said in its "Don't buy Apple Car concept stocks at this time" investment risk warning report: "Although the market has speculated about the possible hardware specifications of Apple Car, we believe that if Apple Car is to succeed, the key is not hardware, but big data and AI." ”

But in the competition of autonomous driving capabilities, although Apple also has cars in the road test, the data generated by it is obviously a huge gap compared to Tesla, which currently has more than one million cars running on the road, not to mention that Apple's car products may not be available until 2024 at the earliest.

And this data gap caused by the time difference is obviously not easy to catch up.

Write at the end:

Among the players who build cross-border cars, Apple has enjoyed a degree of attention that is difficult for other companies to achieve - even if the official has never answered positively that it is building a car, the industry has pulled the expectations of Apple's car manufacturing extremely high, and even Tesla, the current leader in the electric market, has designated it as the biggest competitor.

The high expectations of the market are based on Apple's influence on the industrial chain, large investment in the field of automobile research and development, continuous recruitment, continuous patent acquisition and strong software and hardware integration capabilities, of course, it is based on Apple's great success in the field of consumer electronics.

These give people the basis for high expectations for Apple's car.

But the interesting thing about the market may be that success in area A does not necessarily mean moving to area B. At present, Apple's "progress or failure to meet expectations, and to a certain extent, the loss of product definition and supply chain control" in the car construction seems to be a true portrayal of the interesting points of this market.

Here, too, we may have reason to suspect that, in a way, we overestimate Apple's ability to build cars.