Written by | Zhao Lingwei
Editor| Yang Guang
Produced | Automotive Sankei
This is the third time that Apple cars have been rumored to be at a standstill.
"If you want to mass-produce Apple Car in 2025, you need to reorganize your team within 3 to 6 months." Tianfeng Securities analyst Guo Mingxi posted such a judgment on social media.
Apple cars seem to be regarded as a huge threat by the entire automotive industry, but this "threat" is too deadly and seems to be difficult to emerge.
Last year was the year when Apple's car news was the most intensive, and after 8 years of painstaking research and development by one of the smartest brains on the planet, it seems that it is finally starting to look for the possibility of product landing.
A number of foreign media reported that "Apple's fully autonomous vehicles or will be officially unveiled around 2024", but it is recognized that it is difficult for society and roads to have fully autonomous driving conditions in 2024.
Apple Cars is like an enthusiast who always pursues higher technology, but when it comes to the process of converting into commodities, it is at a loss.
NO.1
[Two departures]
Since the "Titan Project" surfaced, it has been common for Apple to poach the authority of technology everywhere, with reports that Apple leveraged at least 46 employees, including senior management, from Tesla in 2018.
Judging from the information on the management of Apple cars combed by Bloomberg last year, in addition to technology companies such as Google and BlackBerry, there are also traditional car companies such as FCA, Daimler, and Ford.
(Steve Zadesky, Bob Mansfield, John Giannandrea from left to right)
The luxurious team is not stable. In the eight years since 2014, the head of Apple Cars has switched at least three times. The resulting greater side effect is that its product route has changed again and again, delaying the landing time.
The first "cleansing" of Apple's car-making team was in 2016, when Steve Zadesky, who built the team from scratch, left office.
It is said that the reason for this change is the struggle of internal factions, when one faction believed that semi-autonomous driving was more feasible, and the other faction believed that the development of fully autonomous driving should be started directly.
This internal cognitive contradiction ended in a victory for the latter, and hundreds of people on the Titan team either left their jobs on their own or were redistributed or laid off after a crisis of trust in the direction of the project that year. The remaining staff of the team were allegedly asked to prove the viability of the fully autonomous driving technology by the deadline of late 2017.
Subsequently, Bob Mansfield began leading the project in the summer of 2016, and Apple's automotive strategy shifted to fully autonomous driving. However, after the "restart" of the project, the team specialized in automatic driving and suspended the research and development of the whole vehicle.
In 2018, the news that Apple's vehicle project was restarted again. But in January 2019, Apple once again removed more than 200 employees of the Titan Project.
After Bob Mansfield left office in 2020, Apple Cars began to lose key employees. Last year's wave of executive departures made them lose half of their core team.
At this point, the team it formed in 2021 has all left. In a larger scope, Meta (formerly Facebook) has poached more than 100 former Apple car-related employees in the past few months.
The team is turbulent, the product is difficult to land, although Apple cars have never conveyed anxiety, but at this stage we can not evaluate it is going well.
NO.2
[Product "dystocia"]
Although the team has undergone rounds of blood changes in the 8 years since the establishment of the "Titan Project", it is still difficult to unify the ideology;
Although in the Chinese market on the other side of the ocean, the new forces that started at the same time have reached a cumulative sales volume of 100,000;
But there are still many new brands that regard the non-existent Apple car as the strongest imaginary enemy.
Why is apple cars' product launch schedule so backward?
1, the positioning is constantly swinging
Apple's attitude towards building cars is not firm enough.
In a 2017 Bloomberg report, Apple CEO Tim Cook said: "Autonomous driving is the mother of all artificial intelligence projects and a core technology that we believe is very important."
By 2019 and 2021, Cook talked about the car plan but said: "Apple is passionate about the integration of hardware, software and services, and found the intersection of these aspects, which we think will be a miracle."
This is completely in tune with apple cars.
Under the leadership of Bob Mansfield, Apple's chief hardware engineer, he set the goal of Apple Cars to build an autonomous driving system; but after Doug Field was recruited from Tesla, the team's research and development direction was adjusted to vehicle research and development; now, John Giannandrea, vice president of machine learning, leads the Apple car team, and autonomous driving seems to be back to the main line.
However, Apple does not seem to be in a hurry, and Cook is also very happy to see other small inventions of the car-making team, "They have studied a lot of products internally, although many of them have not yet seen the light of day, but this does not mean that they will not be released." ”
2, can not be copied mobile phone routines
The market overestimates Apple Cars, and Apple Cars also underestimates the auto industry.
Since last year, the news between Apple executives and various OEMs has begun to be frequent, but they do not seem to have received any "good looks".
Becoming a supplier to Apple Cars is not only a huge order for many mobile phone parts companies, but also an absolute force to raise stock prices. But in the automotive industry, there are almost no pure foundries like Foxconn, and automakers are less willing to partner with Apple, which has a strong brand.
The first thing apple expected to cooperate with was hyundai group, but the latter denied having a dialogue with Apple. However, there is also news that Hyundai Kia believes that "cooperating with Apple to build a car will not help Hyundai's brand image."
During the same period, another team of Apple executives sat at the negotiating table of Nissan. But soon after, the two sides stopped talking. Afterwards, Ashwani Gupta, Nissan's chief operating officer, said that Nissan would not change the way it built its vehicles, and stressed that all design, development and production vehicles would be under Nissan's brand name.
It can be seen that Apple's operation in the mobile phone industry cannot be played in the car.
CNN commented that Volkswagen, Ford, General Motors, Tesla, Honda, Nissan, Fiat Chrysler, Peugeot Citroen all have reasons not to cooperate with Apple to build cars. Apple may be more interested in software services such as autonomous driving.
However, if Apple can follow the route of Huawei's car BU and accept weak teammates like Xilis, there may still be a chance. However, the strong Apple still has a hard time giving the foundry the slightest chance to show the brand.
NO.3
[Threats are still there]
Apple, the world's largest market capitalization, has a thick enough foundation to "unconditionally" spoil the car-making team with $19 billion.
Also because of sufficient resources and excellent talents, even if Apple's vehicle project has faced the third restart, it is still revered by peers.
In Li Bin's view, Weilai's main competitor is only one, "Apple earns 70 to 80 billion US dollars a year in profits, has 200 billion US dollars in cash on the books, invests 5 billion US dollars a year in automobile projects, has a team of thousands of people, and has been working for 6 or 7 years." ”
Yang Xiaodong, vice president of SAIC Group and general manager of SAIC Passenger Vehicles, said, "When Tesla's market value exceeds one trillion, what is it most afraid of? It is afraid that Apple's market capitalization will exceed 2 trillion. When Apple starts to build cars, how many users will the 2 trillion-dollar giant take away? ”
Apple certainly has the opportunity to create qualitative change. For example, the self-developed super computing chip M1Max launched in the second half of last year can give full play to its super computing power once it is used for smart cars with vehicle-grade products. Not only that, Apple has also developed a breakthrough lithium iron phosphate battery technology.
But it needs a Jobs to make it happen strongly, and it needs a Cook to sell it well.