A few days ago, according to foreign media reports, another executive of Apple Auto left. The departure was made by Joe Bass, head of software engineering project management for Apple's automotive team, who has served as chief engineering project manager for Apple's automation systems since 2015. According to public information, Joe Bass has now joined Facebook's parent company, Meta, as director of project management for mixed reality technology.
With the departure of Joe Bass, Apple's car management team has now left almost all of them, which casts a shadow over Apple's car-making plans. According to the original plan, Apple is expected to announce a series of strategic cooperation this year and officially launch electric vehicles in 2025.
For more than a year, Apple Cars has been in the world's attention, not in the car to make some progress, but in the succession of executive departure news. A number of executives, including Dave Scott, who is in charge of the automotive-related robotics team, Jaime Weido of the autonomous vehicle safety and regulation team, and Michael Schwickucci, apple car hardware director, have left Apple Cars one after another, making Apple's car manufacturing department an "empty shell".
The reason why the turnover rate of Apple's auto management team remains high may be related to Apple's "unrealistic" goal. According to relevant reports, for the development direction of Apple Cars, in the past few years, Apple Motors has set two directions internally, one is to develop a car with limited automatic driving capabilities; and the other direction is to develop a model with fully autonomous driving capabilities and can be free of manual intervention. It is revealed that the head of Apple's auto team is more inclined to the second direction, or because of this currently unrealistic demand, which has led to the departure of Apple's auto team.
In fact, no matter which of the two directions, the core is the self-driving technology, and in this regard, not only Apple, but also the entire automotive industry, there is no particularly mature program. What's more, Apple's test sample car has also been blown up and has had many accidents. According to the research report of market research agency Navigant, Apple is currently at the bottom of the competitiveness of automatic driving, and there is a more obvious gap with Google Waymo, GM, Baidu, etc. Obviously, if Apple wants to achieve the goal of building a car, it needs more efforts.
Apple began to launch the car project "Titan" in 2014, and after several strategic swings over the years and replacing multiple leaders, there is still no clear direction revealed. Although Apple is now more inclined to build a car without a steering wheel and completely autonomous driving, the difficulty can be imagined.
Therefore, in the past few years, Apple has been focusing on self-driving software, according to media reports, Apple has a small self-driving test team in California, and uses cameras and LiDAR radar to sense the surrounding environment to test the self-driving software.
In this process, Apple has also been seeking partners to eventually achieve the landing of apple car. Therefore, we have seen that Apple has approached South Korea's Hyundai to seek cooperation in car-making projects. Even Foxconn, as an iPhone foundry company, is almost interested in Apple's car manufacturing, and has expressed its willingness to oem for Apple cars, and even launched its own new car to show its ability in automobile manufacturing.
In fact, in order to build cars, Apple has negotiated with at least 6 car manufacturers, including BMW, Daimler, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Hyundai, but obviously, these traditional manufacturers have rejected further cooperation with Apple. Perhaps it is the disagreement between the two sides for the concept of future cars, or the relationship between the interests of brands, apple and car manufacturers cooperate to build cars, which is obviously difficult to go through.
In front of Apple, only the choice of in-depth cooperation with foundry companies such as Foxconn is the most suitable direction. However, as a "car-making novice", Foxconn may not be Apple's first choice, and Magna, which has rich experience in car design and OEM, may be the most suitable collaborator for Apple. Magna, which has high-end attributes and is the birthplace of many luxury cars, is indeed happy to become an Apple car-making partner.
In fact, as early as a few years ago, when Apple first revealed its plan to build a car, Magna has already been in contact with Apple, as a well-known auto parts manufacturer, it has accumulated rich experience in the field of automobile manufacturing, including Mercedes-Benz G-Class, the new BMW 5 Series, Jaguar E-PACE and many other international first-line high-end brands of high-end models are from the Magna factory. Such a factory with both high-end attributes and car-making heritage as Apple's partner can be said to be very suitable.
Time to enter 2022, according to the plan, this year Apple will announce a series of strategic cooperation, in order to lay the next foundation for its car-building plan. Whether we can see more actions by Apple in the matter of building cars this year is also very much looking forward to. However, in front of Apple's car-making road, there are still a series of problems that need to be solved urgently. First of all, the lack of talent, the large number of departures of team management should be an urgent problem at present; secondly, technology, whether it is limited automatic driving or fully autonomous driving, for Apple who is new to building cars, it is also an urgent problem to be solved, of course, I believe that the technology accumulated by Apple in software and hardware should only be a matter of time; and finally production, as mentioned earlier, whether it is Foxconn or Magna, or other foundry companies, is nothing more than a matter of choice. This is the easiest problem for Apple to solve. Of course, in any case, for a company like Apple, making a car can be said to be such a choice, and what we need to pay attention to should only be a matter of time, when Apple will be able to present me with an eye-catching Apple Car.