Text/Zhou Xiongfei
Apple's car- that has been claiming to be building cars, but has not announced its actual progress, has been exposed to bad news.
On Wednesday, Tianfeng International Securities analyst Guo Mingji broke the news on his personal social media that Apple's car team has been disbanded for some time, and If Apple wants to achieve mass production of cars in 2025, it needs to reorganize the team as soon as possible.
Apple's auto team was exposed to disbanding, the source of the picture twitter
Because Guo Mingji has been analyzing and exposing Apple-related content for many years, and the accuracy is extremely high, after he exposed this news, it once became a major news discussed and reported by the industry and many media. Because Apple has not made any public statements about this as of press time, the recent situation of Apple's car project has fallen into doubt.
In such a situation, there are also many people who believe the news revealed by Guo Mingqi, after all, Apple has been exposed to the news of executive departures many times before.
Since the beginning of last year, Apple's car-making team has been exposed to the news that a number of executives have left and jumped to Companies such as Meta, including the person in charge of autonomous driving, vehicle software and hardware, and even Doug Field, vice president of car-making projects.
Executives have left, and the reason behind it is the twists and turns in the process of Apple's car building.
In 2008, Apple founder Jobs had the idea of building a car, and then in 2014, Apple opened the "Titan Plan" to build cars. Due to Apple's absolute superiority in the field of smartphones, this plan was also seen as a solution to subvert the automotive industry at that time.
But after this, with the death of Jobs, Apple's car began to swing repeatedly in the two aspects of automatic driving and vehicle manufacturing, so that too much precious time was wasted. In addition, in the car-making model, although Apple has negotiated with a number of car companies, it has not yet determined the object and form of cooperation.
On the other hand, Tesla, Weilai, Xiaopeng and other new energy vehicle companies started later than Apple, but in the years when Apple hesitated, it developed rapidly, and has now become the head car company with strength in the industry, compared with Apple's car has fallen too much.
From the announcement of the car to the present, Apple has been making cars for 8 years, under the influence of the current team dissolution of the doubtful cloud, how likely is it that Apple can build a car?
1. More than half of the executives have left their jobs, and the team may have been dissolved
It is not surprising that apple car-making team was exposed to disbandment.
At the end of January this year, according to Bloomberg. Joe Bass of Apple's car-making team has completed his departure, and according to the content of his updated resume, he has taken up the position of VR technology project management director of Meta Corporation, playing the "meta-universe".
Joe Bass LinkedIn update information, image source LinkedIn
According to public information, Joe Bass joined Apple in 2015, previously served as a technology project manager at Google, and after joining Apple, he began to take charge of apple car project management, reporting directly to Doug Field, vice president of car projects.
It should be noted that before Joe Bass left, a number of executives had left the Apple car team.
Since the beginning of last year, executives have begun to leave Apple's car-making team, including Benjamin Lyon, who is in charge of self-driving hardware, Dave Scott, Dave Rosenthal in engineering management, and Jalme Waydo, who is responsible for autonomous driving safety.
For their whereabouts, according to relevant media reports, Benjamin Lyon left Apple and joined space startup Astra as the company's chief engineer. Dave Scott and Jalme Waydo became CEOs of healthcare company Hyperfine and CTO of Cavnue, a self-driving car safety company, respectively.
With the departure of these executives, it was like turning on the switch of the faucet, and then more executives left the Apple car team.
In September last year, Doug Field, vice president in charge of Apple's car-making program, left Apple to move to Ford motor as chief advanced technology and embedded systems officer, and according to his social media description, "will work to promote the "Ford+" growth plan, artificial intelligence, software and hardware will be involved. ”
For this change, Apple said in a subsequent email statement that it thanked Field for its contributions to Apple and hoped that everything would go well in the next chapter of his life.
Doug Field's resume is quite eye-catching. According to Late Finance, he joined Tesla as a technology executive after leaving Apple and played an important role in the development of the Model 3 model. In 2018, he left Tesla and returned to Apple and began to promote the process of Apple's car manufacturing.
As a result, when he joined the Apple car project, it was regarded as one of the important turning points of the project. Correspondingly, when he leaves, it seems in the industry that it is likely to affect the overall progress of Apple's car.
Such concerns proved necessary.
Just two months after Doug Field left, another executive in Apple's car project chose to leave, Michael Schwekutsch, who was in charge of the project's automotive hardware-related business. He joined Apple in 2019 after serving as Tesla's vice president, responsible for motors, transmissions, driving systems, and vehicle manufacturing.
Shortly after leaving, it was rumored that he was already senior vice president of engineering at a company called Archer Aviation, whose main business was developing and manufacturing flying taxis. In response to this rumor, the company quickly confirmed the news.
Archer Aviation spokeswoman Louise Bristow has said: "Archer is nearing the completion of its first test flight, which is a critical and exciting moment for the company, and schwekutsch joining at this time is a huge win for us." ”
Also leaving with Michael Schwekutsch is Soonho Ahn, Apple's global battery director, who joined Volkswagen's PowerCo battery division. Although the executive does not belong to Apple's car-making team, because the power battery has become a core component of new energy vehicles, the executive's departure is also seen as a huge blow to Apple's car-making project.
As everyone knows, two months later, Apple's car team sent away Joe Bass, who is responsible for the engineering management business, which is also the seventh executive in Apple's car team to choose to leave.
If you count the situation of Apple's car-making team, you can find that there are thirteen senior executives in the team, who are responsible for the operation of automotive software and hardware, engineering management and autonomous driving-related businesses. With the departure of executives such as Joe Bass, it also means that more than half of the executives in Apple's car-making team have left.
The core executives of Apple's car-making team (marked gray as departed), connected travel mapping
Perhaps because of this, Apple had to make the decision to disband the team. For Apple, this decision is also painful, after all, it has spent too much money to build this team.
According to foreign media Business Insider, as early as the beginning of 2015, that is, the year after Apple released the "Titan Plan", Apple poached 5 executives from Tesla, including mechanical engineering managers and product design managers.
By April 2016, Apple had successfully poached Chris Pollett, then vice president of Tesla Engineering, the first Tesla senior executive apple had poached. According to CNBC, as of the end of 2019, Apple has poached more than 300 people from Tesla.
In order to poach talents more smoothly, apples give generous salaries and rewards.
According to media reports, Apple has been providing incentives to former Tesla employees who joined the company, generally with a signing bonus of $250,000 and a high job-hopping fee of 60% of the signing bonus. In terms of salary, it is basically 1.5 times that of Tesla.
Hard work has recruited talents, but in the end it is difficult to retain talents. Behind this embarrassing situation, the bumps in Apple's road to car building are highlighted.
2, Apple made a car, the fate is uncertain
If Apple is interested in building cars, it has to come from Jobs's ideas.
Back in 2008, after the original iPhone sold 6 million units, an inspired Jobs talked about his visions for Apple cars, saying, "Apple cars should be made up of batteries, computers, engines, and machinery." ”
After that, Jobs said in public many times: "We have a platform to design a good car, and we will build a car in the near future." Because under the leadership of Jobs, the iPhone has achieved great success, Apple has become a world-famous technology company, and many fruit fans are also looking forward to jobs's "Apple car".
Image source Apple official Twitter
In order to make his ideas a reality, Jobs, as a "layman", began to learn car-making techniques. In 2010. He invited car designer Brian Thompson to his home to discuss car-making techniques. In addition, according to some foreign media reports, Jobs also visited traditional American car companies such as GM and Volkswagen in those two years.
Just when the outside world expected Jobs to make a change in the automotive industry, they waited for the news of Jobs's death. As a result, Apple has also completed the replacement from the "Jobs" era to the "Cook" era.
Unlike Jobs, Cook was a businessman who valued the profits of the business more than changing the world. Therefore, in order to maintain Apple's excellent sales performance and profit growth, although Cook continued Apple's plan to enter the automotive industry, he decided not to risk making cars for the time being, and only opened the research and development plan of in-vehicle software.
In June 2013, at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled the "iOS in the Car" project. As the name suggests, the project is to implement the iPhone's application functions in the in-car system screen, allowing drivers to use functions such as map navigation, playing music and making calls without interruption.
The following year, Apple turned the "iOS in the Car" project into a software product - CarPlay, but at that time, Google and Baidu also released Android Auto and Carlife, so that after the release of CarPlay, it was complained by the industry that it had similar functions and nothing new compared to these software.
CarPlay display picture, image source Apple official website
At that time, the entire automotive industry was undergoing a sea change.
In 2014, Tesla CEO Elon Musk came to China with more than a dozen Model Ss, and handed over the keys of these Model Ss to the first batch of domestic car owners. Since then, a wave of new energy car manufacturing has been set off in China, and new energy vehicle companies such as Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal have been established.
Seeing Tesla, which was once unseemly, enter the Chinese market, Cook may not be able to sit still. That same year, he approved a project code-named "Project Titan" (Titan) within Apple, which became known in the industry as Apple's car-making project.
At the beginning of the project, the main goal was to create a car that would disrupt the industry, starting from scratch like the Mac and iPhone originally designed, so as to achieve a comprehensive leadership in product design, use and technology.
In order to achieve this goal, Apple not only established a car lab near the headquarters, but also recruited automotive and software engineers from Google, Tesla, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, FCA and other companies with attractive salaries.
At the same time of digging corners everywhere, Apple also registered three domain names of "apple.car", "apple.cars" and "apple.auto", and apple's ambition to build cars was revealed for a time.
But soon, Apple's process of building cars encountered obstacles again.
The biggest obstacle is the disagreement within the car-making team. On one side, a team led by Steve Zadesky, Apple's former head of automotive projects, hopes that the Titan project can develop a car with semi-autonomous driving; the other side is desperate to do it in one step and create a fully autonomous driving platform.
In the face of such internal disagreements, at first Apple executives also swayed and hovered between the two solutions, research and development fell into a shed for a time, and most of the engineers in the team were dismissed. By mid-2016, as Cook moved to the side of the self-driving platform, this internal disagreement was resolved.
"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. Cook told the media.
In April 2017, Apple obtained permission to test self-driving cars on the road, and although there have been many news about Apple's self-driving road tests every year, substantial products have not been released. The reason behind this is not only because autonomous driving itself has a lot of technology to tackle, but also that the laws and regulations related to automatic driving technology are not mature.
In this regard, Bob Mansfield, who was the director of Apple's self-driving project, admitted that under the conditions at that time, it was almost impossible to make Apple's first model directly on the L4 level of automatic driving system.
After the self-driving technology failed, Cook restarted the car-making plan again in 2018, and invested his hopes in vehicle manufacturing.
Perhaps Cook is also aware of the backwardness of Apple's car construction, so after restarting the car, it began to accelerate further. In May of that year, Apple not only recruited Doug Field, a senior vice president of engineering who had been in charge of Model 3 research and development, from Tesla to focus on the promotion of Apple's car-making projects; it also began to negotiate cooperation with South Korean car companies such as Hyundai Motor.
After that, Apple recruited more talents from Tesla, General Motors and other car companies on the one hand, and negotiated cooperation with more car companies on the other hand. According to cbn, in addition to Hyundai, Apple has also negotiated with traditional car companies such as Mercedes-Benz, Daimler, Kia and Nissan.
It turns out that although the car construction has accelerated, the effect is not satisfactory.
Although Apple has carried out cooperation negotiations with at least 6 car companies since 2018 in order to build cars, they have rejected the olive branch thrown by Apple without exception. On the other hand, with the departure of senior executives in the car-making team in 2021, there will be news that the current team has been exposed to dissolution.
Since 2014, Apple has been making cars for 8 years. Although it was held high at first, it was full of twists and turns during the period, even in the current embarrassing situation.
3, Apple car, can it still be built?
There are less than two years left before apple cars are exposed.
In September last year, according to foreign media Apple Insider, Apple planned to launch "Apple Cars" in 2024, and in order to achieve this goal, Apple is also visiting South Korean and Japanese automakers, including Toyota Motors.
At the beginning of February this year, South Korea's "East Asia Daily" also mentioned that Apple will invest 4 trillion won (about $3.6 billion) in South Korea's Kia Automobile Company, and the two sides plan to launch Apple cars around 2024, with the initial goal of selling 100,000 cars per year.
For these rumors, Apple maintained a habitual "three-tongue-in-cheek" attitude and did not make any response. Therefore, in the industry's view, although Apple did not respond, the release time of Apple's car will most likely be around 2024.
But with the dissolution of Apple's car-making team, the debut time of Apple's car has once again fallen into great uncertainty.
According to Guo Mingxi, if Apple wants to mass-produce cars in 2025, then Apple needs to reorganize its team within 3-6 months. But in the eyes of the industry, it is difficult for Apple to do this.
"Based on the uncertainty of apple car projects, coupled with the impact of the departure of many executives before, it is not easy for Apple to fill these important positions in a short period of time." Sun Hao, head of research and development of a domestic head car company, told Wired Travel.
In addition to the uncertainty of the team members, there are also problems in the design and manufacture of vehicles.
For the choice of Apple's car model, based on the fact that Apple has approached a number of car companies before, its high probability of choosing the OEM model has also become the consensus of the industry. However, based on the above, it can be seen that Apple's contact with car companies is not smooth.
As for the news that Apple and Kia will cooperate to build cars this year, there has been no news of other progress since then, and perhaps this cooperation has not been finalized in the end.
In Sun Hao's view, it is normal for these traditional car companies to refuse Apple's OEM, because Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and Nissan car companies want technology and technology, resources and resources, and they can live well without Apple, plus if they cooperate, these car companies will also worry about affecting their own business development.
In addition to car companies, Foxconn, which has always been Apple's largest foundry, is also considered to be one of the choices of Apple's car foundry.
However, with Foxconn entering the car-making track and releasing three pure electric models in October last year, it seems in the industry that Foxconn may not be willing to just be Apple's foundry, but wants to become an "all-round player" in the field of car manufacturing. Wired Travel has elaborated on this in the article "Foxconn makes cars, not just want to do OEM work for Apple".
Foxconn released three electric models, picture source Taiwan Central News Agency
In addition, if a non-car company wants to build a cross-border car, it must go through multiple links such as company site selection, determining manufacturing routes and models, team formation, vehicle design, software and hardware adaptation, vehicle manufacturing, safety testing and mass production. As far as all the information is concerned, Apple Auto has not even completed the "team formation" in this process, let alone the things that follow.
"Based on the successive departures of senior executives in the core team of car manufacturing, the foundry car model is difficult to go through, coupled with the hesitation and swing in the car-making process before, Apple has wasted a lot of time in car-making, and in the current uncertainty, Apple's abandonment of car-making and the possibility that Apple's car cannot be built are very large." Zhang Xiang, a researcher at the Automotive Industry Innovation Research Center of North China University of Technology, told Wired Travel.
Zhang Xiang also added that although Apple may give up car building, it is equivalent to saying that it will withdraw from the automotive industry, and then it may once again lay out the road of on-board intelligent software development, because compared with car building, Apple has more advantages in vehicle intelligence.
When it comes to intelligence, we have to talk about autonomous driving. As mentioned above, Apple has had a certain amount of research on the field of autonomous driving in the years of car manufacturing, and the results of the research are reflected in patents.
For example, there is a patent called "remotely-controlled driving control of a vehicle", which aims to ensure that if the system determines that the driver has an emergency health condition and cannot drive the vehicle, the vehicle will be remotely activated to automatically activate the automatic driving function and directly take the driver to the nearest hospital for treatment.
In terms of in-vehicle intelligence, Apple has developed AR-based technology to integrate the actual road map and navigation functions on the front windshield (custom adjustment area, location, information content, display mode, etc.), and based on protecting privacy, it can display the actual surrounding environment on the surrounding car window (or realize entertainment, video telephony and other functions).
Apple Car AR windshield concept art, image source Patently Apple
Although Apple has submitted many patents in recent years, in Sun Hao's view, due to the waste of too much time, these technologies were very leading at the time, and at present, new energy vehicle companies such as Xiaopeng and Ideal have more or less taken the lead in landing these technologies, coupled with Ali, Baidu, Huawei and other large manufacturers are also rapidly laying out in terms of vehicle intelligence, and Apple's advantages are shrinking.
For now, it is really difficult for Apple to achieve the debut of Apple cars in 2024. However, the industry still has high expectations for Apple's car, and Apple may try harder, but there is really not much time left for it.
(The header image of this article comes from Patently Apple, and Sun Hao is a pseudonym.) ）