Recently, Apple analyst Guo Mingxi once again brought the latest progress of Apple car manufacturing, but this time it is not good news.
Guo Mingxi said on Twitter: Apple's internal auto team has been disbanded for a period of time, and must be restructured in the next 3-6 months to catch up with the goal of achieving mass production in 2025.
Small partners who pay attention to Apple are familiar with Guo Mingxi's three words, and in the past few years, his analysis of Apple products has been extremely accurate. The foreign website Apple Track once collected 106 revelations by Guo Mingxi, and verified the results one by one and found that the accuracy rate was as high as 76.4%.
In fact, since Apple disclosed the "Titan Plan", the road to car building has not been smooth: frequent replacements of car executives, uncertain car-making strategies, inability to find suitable foundries, and brain drain. The superposition of a series of unfavorable factors makes Guo Mingxi's prediction more credible.
Apple, once considered Tesla's biggest competitor, why can't it?
The ancient Chinese people paid attention to the time, location, and people, which is reflected in the field of car building, that is, money, land, and people. Apple, whose market value once exceeded $2 trillion, is naturally not bad money, not bad. But in terms of "people", the Apple car team is always almost meaningless.
In 2014, when the Titan Project was launched, its management aimed to create an advanced assisted driving car product, but in the process of promoting the car project, Apple's strategy for entering the car was constantly changing, repeatedly swinging during the construction of a car and a fully autonomous driving platform.
At the beginning of Apple's car-making project, iPod and iPhone designer Steve Zadesky was appointed to the project, and he and his team have always wanted to develop a car product. In 2016, steve Gindsky left Apple Cars and Apple hardware engineer and former executive Bob Mansfield began taking control of the electric vehicle project, at a time when Apple's entry into the auto industry shifted to developing self-driving car platforms. After Apple poached Doug Field, the former senior vice president of Tesla engineering, the team's research and development direction was once again adjusted to vehicle research and development. In 2020, Bob Mansfield retired and artificial intelligence director John Giannandrea took over the car-making project, a technical talent that Appleflower has hired heavily to focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence strategy. In 2021, Kevin Lynch took over the leadership of the car project, and he was apple's vice president of technology, responsible for the Apple Watch project.
When management's ideas continue to change, the Loss of Talent from the Apple Automotive Team, or even disbandment, makes sense. At the beginning of the "Titan" plan, Apple once set up a car-making team with a scale of up to 1,000 people, and Car companies such as Chrysler, Tesla, and Ford were dug into corners by Apple. In Apple's long exploration of the road to car building, the former BMW electric vehicle research and development Urlich Kranz, Apple car project radar system chief engineer Eric Rogers, former Tesla software director CJ Moore, Apple car project battery system department engineering manager Alex Clarabut, hardware engineering manager Stephen Spiteri, and Dave Scott, who leads the automotive-related robotics team. Jaime Waydo, who led the self-driving car safety and regulation team, and Benjamin Lyon, who helped Apple create the original car team, have left one after another, and the departure of these talents with car-making experience is bound to be a heavy blow for Apple.
Internally, the core management of Apple's car-making project is turbulent and the loss of personnel is serious, and externally, Apple has not found a suitable car-making partner. BMW, Daimler, Toyota, and Volkswagen have all negotiated with Apple, and the latest news has also revealed that Apple will use a modern electric vehicle platform to build cars. Unfortunately, Apple does not seem to be too popular with car companies.
As we all know, Apple is the king of supply chain management, in the field of consumer electronics, Foxconn, Luxshare Precision, Goertek and other companies are famous for cooperating with Apple, but at the same time, it should be noted that Apple has a strong desire to control the suppliers it cooperates with, and the automobile industry has a huge supply chain system, such as chip design, autonomous driving solutions and other core technologies, Apple will firmly grasp in its own hands.
In the era of software-defined cars, the level of intelligence has become the core competitiveness of automotive products. Subject to their own lack of production experience, Apple and car companies most likely want to find a foundry, and then look at the object of Apple's negotiations, these multinational giants are not bad money first, followed by their own production capacity is also tight, coupled with Apple is a senior "Dementor", why do they have to choose to cooperate with Apple, make wedding clothes for others?
The top car companies do not look up to Apple as a rookie, although the old friend Foxconn began to build cross-border cars, but it is not the partner that Apple wants to find with senior car manufacturing experience. High or low, let Apple's road to car building is particularly lonely.
At the same time as breaking the news of the dissolution of Apple's car-making team, Guo Mingxi also said that if Apple wants to complete the goal of mass production in 2025, it must be restructured in the next 3-6 months. For Apple, it is difficult to find a new team that meets its needs in a short period of time. Of course, Apple may also choose to postpone the established mass production time, but at the current development rate of new energy vehicles, how much space can the new car-making forces led by Tesla and the giants who have invested heavily in electrification leave for Apple Cars? It's an unknown.
In addition, the premise of everything is that Apple is willing to continue on the road of building cars.
As mentioned earlier, Apple's entry into the car industry has been oscillating between two very different routes of building cars or building an autonomous driving platform. On the one hand, Apple has a strong software ecological foundation, has obvious advantages in providing automotive autonomous driving, vehicle and machine system solutions, and has the ability to become an autonomous driving supplier; on the other hand, Cook has also clearly stated that Apple is more focused on the "core technology" of "autonomous driving systems".
Perhaps, giving up the car-making route, like Huawei, "being the best partner of car companies" is also a new way out. After all, apple has never openly stated that it wants to build a car.