"The Apple car team is disbanded!" The man who knows the inside story of Apple the most exposed

Jia Haonan was sent from the Vice Pilot Temple

Smart car reference | Official account AI4Auto

Apple Cars, just exposed to fierce material:

The smart car team has been disbanded!

Apple car news has been exposed from time to time, but most of them have finally made people laugh. But this time is different -

Because of the whistleblower: Guo Mingxi.

A person who is known as the person who knows the inside story of Apple the best, a person known for the analysis of the upstream and downstream of Apple's industry and supply chain, and most of the predictions and revelations have been confirmed for a long time.

His words have become an important reference vane for investment, digital, and fruit fans.

Therefore, this exposure to Apple's dissolution of the car team, the impact and impact can be imagined.

Guo Mingxi: There is not much time left for Apple

According to Guo Mingxi, the Apple car team has been "disbanded" for a while.

What impact does the dissolution of the team have on apple's auto project?

Guo Mingxi also sounded the alarm bell: if Apple wants to achieve mass production at this point in 2025, it must reorganize a smart car team in the next 3-6 months.

According to his predictions last year, Apple's timeline for cars depends on the progress of self-driving research and development, and it will not be released until 2025 at the earliest.

What if the team, structure, and talent don't go well next?

The day Apple Cars came out was not good.

In fact, Guo Mingji said last year that most media and institutions are too optimistic about apple cars.

The time point he gave for 2025 is the most ideal situation for everything to go well in the project, and it is not impossible for Apple cars to achieve mass production in 2027 and 2028.

Even at this point in time in 2027, in Guo Mingxi's view, it is a more rational and sober judgment.

By the way, this person who understands Apple's business and supply chain the most also advises everyone not to blindly buy Apple car concept stocks at present.

Having said all this, it is time to introduce where this Guo Mingqi is sacred.

He is an analyst at Tianfeng Securities, who has been tracking Apple for a long time and has a deep research on Apple's products, business and supply chain.

How many Apple products did he successfully predict or expose?

Nine times out of ten hit the bullseye.

For example, in March 2017, Guo Mingxi made ten predictions for the release of new iPhones in 6 months, including the number of new iPhones, screen size, memory, storage, color matching, and delayed release dates.

Looking back now, these predictions were almost all in place.

Users, fans, and even the entire industry are keeping an eye on Apple, but not many people can really get the news from it, and it is accurate.

So this wave of exposure to Apple cars weighs heavily, see.

So what are the key figures in the disbanded Apple car team?

If Kuo's news is true, it means that Kevin Lynch, who took over as the fifth head of Apple's car project in September 2021, may have been replaced.

Who is Kevin Lynch?

The former Apple Watch project leader, who had no previous experience in the automotive industry, began working on Apple's car projects last September.

At the time, many speculated that the creator of the most successful wearable device would bring disruptive design ideas and product ideas to Apple cars.

As a result, in just half a year, the business team did not exist.

It seems that Lynch is not the right person in Cook's mind to define Apple's smart car.

Among the first 4 leaders of Apple's car project, there are veterans from traditional car companies, hardware experts trained by Apple itself, and Model 3 project traders recruited from Tesla, but all of them are out of class.

In contrast, Apple's goals for the auto project have also been wavering, switching between all-driverless cars and advanced assisted driving several times.

But what has not changed is that there has been no significant progress.

Apple's dissolution of the auto project team this time, is there little hope of difficulties, or is it a new starting point for a complete organizational reconstruction?

Will Apple cars be a series of hardships and eventually become a failure case of cross-border car manufacturing?

No one dares to draw conclusions yet.

However, if you understand the twists and turns and shocks experienced by Apple's car project since its establishment in 2014, it seems that you can also make some guesses.

True or false, what is the progress of Apple's car?

Generally speaking, car building can not go around the three items of money, people, and land.

But for Apple, money and land are not a problem, and the real challenge is who will build the car and how to build the car.

Therefore, to evaluate apple car projects, the important reference becomes the three dimensions of talent, manufacturing, and supply chain.

The first is talent.

The talent shock of Apple's auto project has directly led to the back-and-forth switching of technical routes.

In 2014, the Project Titan program began to surface.

Steve Zadesky, the first head of the company, was previously Apple's vice president of product design and has worked for traditional car companies.

Under his leadership, the Titan project is the same as Tesla's, that is, to develop a car with advanced assisted driving features.

However, Apple's chief designer, Jonathan Ive, disagrees, hoping to create a fully autonomous driving platform. Even in public, if Apple wants to get a car, it has to have no steering wheel.

This is actually a battle of two routes, one heavy software, one is Apple's good combination of soft and hard, more bluntly, one to do self-driving software companies, the other to be a car company.

In 2016, the first turning point occurred. Steve Zadesky and Jonathan Ive both left, and former retired executive Bob Mansfield returned to take over the Titan project.

He prefers to "develop software and support solutions", so there is new news that the vehicle development plan has been cut.

The subsequent disclosures are indeed more software and technology, such as autonomous driving.

In 2018, the situation changed again, that is, at this time, the outside world began to feel that Apple's car project did not seem to be going well.

This year, Doug Field, a former Tesla senior vice president of engineering who led the mass production of the Model 3, joined titans as the head of the pack.

As a result, Apple returned to the route of vehicle manufacturing.

However, Doug Field failed to substantially promote the landing of Apple's car during his tenure, and withdrew in September 2021.

And Kevin Lynch, the head of Apple Watch who took over, the outside world has not even figured out his philosophy and route, and quickly left the class...

Who's next, I don't know.

Therefore, to sum up the progress of Apple Cars in terms of talents, there is no shortage of big cattle, but it is unstable. The coming and going of key core talents has become the norm, which obviously affects the progress of the project.

Then there's the manufacturing side.

Since the doug Field franchise, Apple has actually embarked on the road of vehicle manufacturing, and the patents and recruitment information exposed over the years also confirm this.

So the question is, how did Apple build the car?

At present, the news revealed is that Apple is more inclined to define itself, and the specific production cooperates with car companies to do it for them.

So since last year, there have been news that Apple and car manufacturers have talked about cooperation.

Including but not limited to Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai...

However, I don't know if these OEMs are also afraid that cooperation with Apple will "lose their soul", so far no car manufacturer has reached a foundry agreement with Apple.

There was news that South Korea's Hyundai Group was very close to reaching a cooperation, and even the factory location and capacity planning were conclusive, but it later turned out to be fake news that Hyundai executives engaged in insider stock trading.

Therefore, in the process of vehicle manufacturing, Apple can be said to have achieved very little, and there is no obvious progress compared with 2019.

This brings us to another important reference: the supply chain.

Apple has always been known for its ability to manage its supply chain. Many companies also thrive by doing supporting OEM services for Apple products.

Although Apple officials have never publicly admitted to building cars, after Cook said "no comment", supply chain companies large and small have moved.

There are auto parts companies that expect to break into Apple's supply chain, and there are also Apple's long-term partners who want to share a piece in the car cake.

The most representative are Foxconn and Luxshare Precision.

These two companies are currently "running" to car manufacturing, related equipment, production lines have begun to purchase construction, no doubt is to apple car production orders.

Therefore, although the production and manufacturing of Apple's car is unknown and the business team is "unknown", in terms of supply chain, various manufacturers have been practicing "internal strength" to prepare for orders.

And it can be said that no one is more eager for apple cars to land smoothly than they do.

From these three aspects, it can depict the basic situation of Apple Cars now: the car is indeed being built, but the progress is really not smooth.

Internal instability, external cooperation is not smooth.

Fortunately, there are also supply chain companies cultivated by Apple that do not abandon it.

And, although it has always been rumored and has been very turbulent, it does not prevent peers from taking Apple smart cars as the biggest competitors.

Weilai or Jidu have already let go of words: the biggest competitor will be Apple.

—Ends—

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