Apple car is a bubble? Punctured?

Follow and star the electric planet News

Punch in every day to read

Gain a deeper understanding of the automotive industry transformation

————————

Producer: Electric Planet News

Author: Fat Fei classmate

In the early hours of this morning, Apple's most famous whistleblower, Guo Mingji, said that Apple's car-making team had been disbanded for some time. If mass production of fully driverless cars is to be achieved by 2025, it will take 3-6 months to complete the restructuring.

We calculate that it has been eight years since 2014 when Apple set up a project to build a car!

Eight years!

Eight years ago, Musk was still a niche, wanfu referred to, the nobody of the automotive industry;

But eight years later, Tesla is approaching a million units a year, and it is about to open a factory in Berlin, Germany, the heart of the global auto industry.

Eight years ago, there were no new cars in China! At that time, Li Bin wanted to build a car to find Lei Jun, and he would still be thought to be a liar?

But eight years later, New Chinese cars such as Weilai and Xiaopeng have not only approached the annual sales of 100,000 units, but have even formulated plans to go to sea, to hit Norway, to Europe, and even to the United States!

And Apple Cars? Eight years later, the news came out that the team had disbanded.

At this time, many people said that Apple's car was not a bubble, and it was finally punctured; some people still expected Apple to bring subversive new cars, and even Li Bin and He Xiaopeng thought that Apple cars would be the biggest variable on this track.

As always optimistic observers of the automotive industry, we are also beginning to have some doubts.....

What do you think, you can see in the comments section! Let's start with what we see and think.

Seven executives left in a year

Just as the so-called iron Apple car, the executives of the flowing water, the frequent changes in the management team of Apple Car can be called a major curiosity in the car industry and even the technology industry.

Just earlier this year, Joe Bass, Apple's automotive software engineering program leader, left Apple, where he had been with apple for seven years, to join Apple's old rival Meta (formerly facebook) as director of mixed reality technology project management.

According to Bloomberg at the time:

"With the departure of Joe Bass, the Apple auto management team that was founded a year ago has now fallen apart."

Because it's not just Joe Bass, Apple Cars has lost seven executives in the past year.

In the period from 2014 to 2021, the ambitious Apple car project gathered 14 technology giants, and at that time, the "fourteen King Kongs" had internal job transfers and poaching friends, who were both executives of Apple Cars and experts in defining Apple's new products. However, in this year's personnel earthquake, these fourteen core members have already gone halfway.

They are:

1、Benjamin Lyon

Beginning in February 2021, Apple's management team began to show signs of collapse. The first person to choose to leave this year was Benjamin Lyon, head of the sensor team, who chose aerospace startup Astra as chief engineer to start his new journey.

For Apple, Benjamin Lyon weighs heavily. He joined Apple for more than two decades, brought Touch ID to the iPhone, and set off a boom in mobile phone fingerprint recognition.

From the handset division to car research and development, Benjamin Lyon helped found Apple's Titan project in 2014, and as the project elder, he later formed a sensor team for self-driving cars, reporting directly to Doug Field, then Apple's vice president of automotive.

2、Jaime Waydo

Just the same month that Benjamin Lyon left, Jaime Waydo, head of Apple's self-driving car safety and regulatory team, also announced his departure. The female tech moguel joined A self-driving car safety company called Cavnue as CTO, also a startup-stage startup.

Jaime Waydo was poached into Apple in 2018 after she was a systems engineer at Waymo, and jaime's resume was even more "cool" before that. She spent ten years at NASA as chief maneuvering mechanical engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, successfully sending the Curiosity rover to Mars.

3、Dave Scott

Fast forward to June 2021, Dave Scott, head of Apple's automotive-related robotics research team, left his job. His previous resume was quite polished, with executives at several companies, but almost none of them had anything to do with cars.

Before joining Apple Motors, he was more of a biomedical device expert and served as a technology research and development post for many years. His departure is also a return to the old business, joining a healthcare equipment company Hyperfine, which is the launch company of portable MRI and has a good reputation in the field of medical equipment.

4、Doug Field

In September 2021, Doug Field's job-hopping gave Apple Cars its heaviest blow.

He is the vice president of the Apple Titan project, the boss of many of the above experts, and arguably the highest-ranking manager who has left apple car projects so far. In a career spanning more than three decades, Doug Field's talent is there for all to see, but repeated "sideways jumps" are another of his career features.

In 1987, after graduating with a master's degree in mechanical engineering, he joined Ford, and after more than two decades of honing his skills in traditional car companies, Doug Field joined Apple as vice president of product design, leading the design and development of the Mac.

In 2013, Doug Field jumped out of Apple to Tesla, and Doug, who has a cross-border background, was promoted to senior vice president of vehicle research and development and manufacturing a year later, becoming one of Tesla's four core executives, and it is not an exaggeration to say that he is the "father of Model 3".

Musk once said, "I think Doug is one of the most talented engineers in the world, very focused on automotive engineering."

2018 was Tesla's hardest "mass production hell" moment, when Musk slept in the factory to promote production, and Doug Field became a member of Tesla's departure wave, and the executives who left on his front foot were JimKeller, the head of software and hardware for Autopilot's autopilot system.

In the same year, the retired Doug Field chose to return to Apple, and Doug Field, which created the Model 3, was naturally the best candidate for the vice president of the Titan project. Working with him was titan's "second-generation leader": Bob Mansfield, chief engineer of the Apple Watch.

With the departure of Steve Zadesky, Apple's vice president of product design, the Titan project's "first generation leader" in 2016, the Apple car project has been in turmoil and change, and Doug's task is to continue to promote the development of Apple cars with Bob, the "firefighting general" who was rehired.

After a bloody layoff, the focus of Apple's auto project began to shift from hardware to software, that is, the development of autonomous driving technology.

At the end of 2020, Bob, who was in danger, was once again emeritus, and the "third generation leader" John Giannandrea suddenly took the horse, and then Doug Field once again announced that he would leave Apple and return to his "old owner" Ford. After Doug left, Kevin Lynch, head of Apple Watch and wellness programs, took over his job, forming the new leadership team for Apple Cars with John Giannandrea.

5、Dave Rosenthal

Dave Rosenthal was originally the co-founder and CEO of FoundationDB, a database company that was acquired by Apple in 2015 and dave joined Apple. On the Titan project, Dave was responsible for autonomous driving engineering.

In the middle is @Dave Rosenthal

According to Bloomberg, Dave also left Apple last year, but I flipped through a lot of online materials, which rarely describe his whereabouts.

6、Michael Schwekutsch

At the end of 2021, Michael Schwekutsch, Apple's automotive project director, announced his departure.

Michael Schwekutsch is an expert in powertrains, and before coming to Apple, Michael, then Tesla's vice president of engineering, prototyped the Plaid system for Tesla.

In addition to Tesla, Michael has also worked for Porsche, BMW and other car companies, developing electric drive systems for them, winning more than 100 engineering design patents, and he is one of the few "three electric masters" in Apple's car project.

Michael has now joined Archer, an electric air taxi company, as Senior Vice President of Engineering. When Michael leaves Apple:

"While cars do make progress, the only way to see real climate change is to not only make cars more sustainable, but also every means of transport more sustainable." There are opportunities for more sustainable air travel."

7、Joe Bass

Joe Bass is one of more than a hundred apples poached by Meta over the past few months. In order not to let its own senior talent drain to Meta, Apple even issued a stock incentive of up to $180,000 to this wave of employees from the end of 2021.

Since he chose to leave, Joe Bass most likely did not get the money. When he joined Apple in early 2015, Joe Bass took up the Titan project and served as apple's self-driving engineering project manager for six or seven years.

Prior to coming to Apple, Joe spent four years as a senior technical account manager at Google, and after leaving Apple, Joe will be the director of mixed reality technology project management at Meta.

What a luxurious executive lineup! With the departure of this group of talents, the pessimistic attitude of the outside world about Apple's car manufacturing has been further deepened.

Why aren't Apple cars attractive anymore?

While these executives didn't leave a straightforward reason when they left Apple, the reasons are diverse and predictable.

1. The swing on the technical route and the turmoil of the first hand

Under the leadership of the original leader Steve Zadesky, Apple hopes to build a car with limited self-driving, it pays more attention to the production of the whole vehicle, and regards the Apple car more as a mature and reliable mechanical product.

At this time, there is a different voice in the team, Apple's chief designer Jonathan Ive's team believes that Apple's car should be a fully autonomous driving platform, and the focus of work should shift from "priority vehicle manufacturing" to "priority software platform development".

Build fully autonomous cars. In today's parlance, it is a "software-defined" car.

These two voices that determine the future direction of Apple cars are quarreling inside Apple, although Cook finally made the latter decision:

"I think in the future software will become an increasingly important component in cars. Autonomous driving will also become even more important. Apple is focused on self-driving systems, which are very important core technologies and may be one of the most difficult AI projects Apple has undertaken."

But the internal friction brought to Apple by the long-term swing on the technical road has caused Apple cars to lose a lot of valuable time, and led to the loss of many talents in the internal Battel process.

The bloody battle for power ended with the departure of "vehicle faction" Steve Zadesky, who left the Apple car project with hundreds of employees on the team.

In its place is Apple veteran Bob Mansfield, but Bob, who returned from retirement, is only a "fire general" after all, and two years after Doug Field returned to Apple from Tesla, Bob gradually retreated into the background. But shortly after Bob retired again, Doug Field jumped back to its old club, Ford.

In this way, the power of Apple's car changed again, and finally it was handed over to Kevin Lynch, the former head of Apple Watch software.

In seven years, from Steve Zadesky to Bob Mansfield to Doug Field, and finally Kevin Lynch, the baton of Apple Cars has changed hands repeatedly, and almost every first-in-command change has set off a lot of team personnel turmoil, which is obviously not conducive to the development of entrepreneurial teams. Even if Apple Cars figures out what the next way to go, what about team building?

2. Frequent setbacks in the supply chain

At the beginning of last year, there was news that Apple was in contact with South Korea's Hyundai Group, Apple hoped that the latter could build new cars for it in the United States, and Guo Mingxi predicted that Apple would use the hyundai E-GMP pure electric platform and may also cooperate with GM.

Logically speaking, Apple Cars, which focuses on software, does need an experienced car company to build a "hardware foundation", which may also be an important reason why Apple Cars did not choose foxconn, an old friend who frequently showed favors at the first time.

But soon, the news of the failure of the negotiations came out from Hyundai, and the old OEM factory was worried that the OEM brand would bring a blow to its own brand value, and they were not willing to really become what people called "foundry".

After the two sides did not reach an agreement, Bloomberg broke the news that Apple came back to the negotiating table with $3.6 billion in chips, and Hyundai is likely to let its Kia do oem work and participate in the joint research and development of Apple cars.

More than a year has passed, and there is no longer any following on how Apple and Kia have come.

On one side is unresolved, on the other side is a hot face greeting. Although Apple touched a nose of ash in South Korea, Foxconn in China is enthusiastic. As a veteran Apple supplier, Foxconn still releases its own layout of producing electric vehicles from time to time, and throws an olive branch to Apple in the open and in the dark.

Last year, Foxconn released three electric vehicles to show muscle, and at the beginning of this year, it set up a joint venture with Geely to build complete vehicles and parts, and the company also said that it was building factories in the United States and Mexico, and planned to produce electric vehicles in North America in 2023, repeatedly teasing Apple cars.

But in the face of such teasing, Apple has always stood still.

According to industry analysts, Foxconn has a shallow experience in car manufacturing, and it is difficult to become Apple's preferred OEM, and an established car company like Hyundai is the only choice.

Like Foxconn, it covets Apple's car project, luxshare precision, which is also one of Apple's top suppliers in China. Last month, Luxun and Chery established a joint venture company to officially enter the car manufacturing industry, and called itself "ODM", claiming to have the ability to output product design and research and development.

Without much speculation, Foxconn and Luxshare Precision's mind is well known. But in the end, Apple did not buy it, and there was no way to know.

In the matter of car manufacturing, Foxconn and Lixun Precision are new to the industry, although both sides have long been involved in the field of automobile supply, but they lack experience at the level of vehicle manufacturing, and Apple, which is intoxicated with software technology, may still need a traditional OEMs like modern times as a reinforcement.

For modern times, Apple is love and cannot be loved; for Foxconn and Lixun, Apple is Lang's unintentional concubine. The water in the automotive supply chain is much deeper than that of mobile phones, which may be unexpected by the Apple auto team, and Cook, known as a master of supply chain management, seems to have lost the courage of the past.

Seeing that the schedule for mass production in 2025 is getting closer and closer, the time left in Apple's layout production is not much.

Where is Apple Cars going?

Apple has been working on the Titan project since 2014, but more than seven years later, we still can't see a complete prototype of Apple's car.

In the past six years, the domestic and foreign smart electric vehicle market has surged, before there is "Wei Xiaoli" to keep the ring, and then there are Millet, Huawei to follow, if Apple can not come up with subversive innovative products, it is difficult to create the glory of computer mobile phones in the future market. For Apple, which has always been arrogant, if it can't lead the industry, it means failure.

However, the term disruptive innovation hasn't been seen in Apple in a long time. To put it mildly, in the Cook era after Jobs, today's Apple's small innovations are continuous, but there are almost no disruptive products. Cook is a good businessman, but by no means a fanciful product manager.

In the words of @Crab Boss: Cook simply can't bring together the best technology and engineering personnel in the world like Jobs, and lead Apple to another completely disruptive innovation in the automotive field!

According to the information disclosed at the moment, Apple Car as a fully autonomous vehicle, Apple will cut off its steering wheel and pedals, and place an iPad-like tablet in the middle of the car for passenger interaction and emergency takeover of the vehicle.

The interior layout is similar to the design of some concept cars, with passengers distributed on both sides of the body. Vehicles will have sufficient redundancy systems to ensure safety and support multiple charging systems that can be replenished on charging networks around the world.

But despite this, the specific product form of Apple's car is still a fog, quite advanced expectations can only be said to be expected, Apple has announced many patents, but slightly conventional. However, this does not mean that Apple Car has no expectations, and there are two aspects that individuals are more concerned about:

The first is the fully autonomous driving technology just mentioned, which is a big move;

Then there is the chip, which Apple is rumored to be building a highly advanced car chip, which is said to be the most advanced component developed by Apple in-house, and its neural network is enough to support high-level autonomous driving. Taking the A-series chip of the iPhone and the M1 chip of the Mac as an example, Apple's strength in chips is worth looking forward to.

Of course, there is what we have been saying "Apple Family Bucket", with iOS as a series, Apple has opened up a variety of hardware such as mobile phones, tablets, computers, smart homes, wearable devices, etc., and its interaction ability is well known, and a set of CarPaly systems is a group of traditional original factory cars and machines under the feet.

In addition, there is ar technology that Apple has been quietly brewing for so many years, which is understood to be installed on the windshield of Apple's car. Will Apple have its own car system? These are still puzzles.

To be sure, if Apple can organically integrate these ecological capabilities, the imagination space of Apple cars is still huge.

As Guo Mingxi said, the first urgent need for Apple to solve at the moment is "recruitment" and restructuring, the loss of senior management, the dissolution of the team is a heavy blow to Apple, and it is not easy to reorganize the team in a short period of time.

In addition, There is the tiger's eye of Chinese technology companies, one is Huawei, which "does not build cars", and the other is Xiaomi, which is "building cars in a broken boat". Both have strong software and hardware research and development capabilities, and sit on a huge intelligent ecosystem, which is Apple's competitors that cannot be ignored outside of "Wei Xiaoli".

Then again, eight years later, Apple's car can be said to be a road of ups and downs, and it is still a white roll. In the eyes of many people, it is already a bubble!

Although we are full of worries, we really expect Apple to use the facts to punch the singers in the face!

Planet article recommendations