Goodbye, Apple Cars

Car stuff (public number: chedongxi)

The author | James

Edit the | Xiao Han

Last night, Tianfeng International Securities analyst Guo Mingji broke the news on Twitter: Apple's car team has been disbanded for some time. If it wants to mass-produce cars in 2025, apple needs to reorganize its team in 3 to 6 months.

▲ Guo Mingxi tweeted

Guo Mingxi is a senior analyst at Tianfeng International Securities, who has been analyzing and breaking news about Apple-related content for many years, and the accuracy is quite high. Therefore, the fierce material he broke out this time is also worth repeated consideration.

If Guo Mingxi's revelation is true, it means that we will not be able to see Apple cars debut in 2025.

In 2014, Apple's car-making project "Titan" was exposed, which attracted close attention in the global technology field, and the world's major technology companies, Internet giants, car companies and consumers all wanted to see if the global smart hardware king could redefine the car.

In the past seven years, the Internet has continuously exposed patents related to Apple cars. Practices such as installing touch screens on seat belts and creating smart doors are really innovative. In 2021, there are frequent news that Apple will visit the supply chain of Japan and South Korea, and even use modern electric vehicle platforms to build cars, which further raises the expectations of the outside world for Apple cars.

Guo Mingxi's revelations, combined with the frequent news of executive departures, it seems that Apple cars are not getting closer and closer, but getting farther and farther, and even like Dyson's car, it has become an unfinished history.

As apple is customary, it's not surprising to cut some projects. Internally, the R&D team explores multiple products simultaneously. If a product is too far from mass production, it is likely to be cut or suspended, and the AirPower wireless charging pad a few years ago was stopped because mass production was too difficult.

In the automotive project, whether it is the car-making process of the car, or the intelligent research and development, or the creation of luxury, it is a challenge for Apple, and it is difficult to achieve L4 level automatic driving capabilities. So even if Apple has recruited a large number of car company engineers, it is still too difficult to build a smart electric car with "Apple style" and can shock the four seats.

Expectations are too high to be achieved, which may be the root cause of Apple's having to abandon the Titan plan.

First, the supply chain to step up the layout of the automotive business Foxconn Luxun Precision has entered

Since 2014, Apple has begun to explore the automotive business, and it has been nearly 8 years. Although Apple has explored many directions in the past 8 years from mass production autonomous driving to mass production of complete vehicles, the industry generally believes that Apple will really build a car and eventually put it on the market.

Therefore, as apple's core supply chain manufacturers, are rapidly laying out the automotive business. The two largest of them are Foxconn and Luxshare Precision.

▲ Electric bus Model T that has been delivered

At the beginning of last year, Foxconn, one of Apple's largest foundries, began to build cars, first launching its own MIH car manufacturing platform, and then signing agreements with a traditional car company and new car-making forces without production plants, and also releasing three prototypes.

In March this year, Foxconn's first electric vehicle, the Model T, was officially delivered to Kaohsiung Passenger Transport. The electric bus became Foxconn's first model.

At the same time, Luxshare Precision, another top supplier in Apple's supply chain, signed a cooperation agreement with Chery Automobile in February this year and invested tens of billions of yuan to purchase Chery's equity, which will become The Tier 1 of the automotive industry in the future.

In addition to the two companies in Apple's core supply chain, Apple supply chain companies such as Lingyi Intelligent Manufacturing and Changying Precision are also among the automotive fields.

According to the incomplete statistics of car things, more than 80% of the companies in the core supply chain list released by Apple have business layouts directly related to the automotive industry.

Obviously, Apple's core supply chain companies have laid out the automotive business, which can show to a certain extent that the supply chain is preparing for Apple's cars.

Second, the core team has left the team boss for a round

The outside world is optimistic and expects Apple to build cars, which does not mean that Apple's car is smooth. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman report, Apple has lost its core team members in autonomous driving and cars since last year, and the executive team has also ushered in a major change of blood.

In January, Joe Bass, head of software engineering projects for Apple's automotive team, left and joined Meta. Previously, he had been working on the Apple car project for 7 years, and he was a veteran.

▲Since 2020, more than half of Apple's car executives have left (gray is departed)

This is just the most recent incident of a core team member leaving. Since last year, three core members, Dave Scott, Jaime Waydo, Dave Rosenthal and Benjamin Lyon, have left, and Doug Field, who is in charge of the automotive team, has also left last year to join Ford Motor. After that, Michael Schwekutsch, who was in charge of the hardware of the Apple project, also left Apple.

It can be said that 6 of Apple's 13-person core team have left Apple last year.

At the same time, the two top executives of Apple's auto project also changed a round in 2020-2021. At the end of 2020, John Giannandrea, Apple's senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, was appointed head of automotive projects, and former director Bob Mansfield officially retired. John Giannandrea reported directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook, which shows that Apple still attaches great importance to the car-making plan.

John Giannandrea, senior vice president of Apple

In 2021, Doug Field, Apple's Titan project executive director, left, and Apple's vice president of technology Kevin Lynch took over his position as the "number one" in the execution of the car project. However, from Kevin Lynch's past experience, he initially worked as adobe's CTO, and then his own company was acquired by Adobe at a high price, and then entered the Apple Watch developed by Apple, whose experience has nothing to do with car building.

Kevin Lynch, Apple's vice president of technology

John Giannandrea and Kevin Lynch entered the Apple car team, which means that the highest-level supervisors of the car project have all been replaced.

In fact, for any company, frequent changes in the senior management team have a great impact on the progress and efficiency of research and development.

Perhaps, this is one of the reasons why Apple has rarely achieved substantial results in making cars.

Conclusion: There is still a lot of uncertainty about Apple's car

Although the industry is full of expectations for Apple cars, if Apple's research and development cannot keep up with the plan, then there is a great possibility that the car-making plan will be stopped. According to Apple's vision, a car that can fully autonomously drive itself is one of the key capabilities of apple car. But judging from Apple's self-driving test results, its level is not the top in the industry.

Last month, major self-driving test companies submitted test reports for the whole year to the California DMV, and Apple was among them. Among them, Apple's total mileage of the self-driving test ranked 14, and the MPD (average mileage per departure) was 20.02 miles (about 32km), ranking 22nd, which was slightly mediocre from the results, and there was a significant gap with the more active head players such as Waymo, Cruise, and Pony Zhixing, and even not in an order of magnitude.

2022 may be the year of success or failure for Apple cars. In the context of a large number of executive departures, the shape of the car can not be determined, and even the results of the self-driving test are relatively mediocre, there is still a lot of uncertainty in Apple's car manufacturing.