What kind of car does Apple want to build?
Wen | Ren Yafei, a reporter for China Entrepreneur
Editor| Yao Yun
The source of the head map is | Panorama Network Zeng Jing, a cartographic |
Just like "the people need Millet to build cars", the market needs Apple to build cars.
On March 16, Guo Mingxi, an analyst at Tianfeng International Securities, said in a Tweet post that Apple's auto project team has been disbanded for some time, and in order to achieve the goal of mass production by 2025, Apple Auto needs to be restructured within 3 to 6 months.
Over the years, Guo Mingji has been known for disclosing accurate information about Apple's new products in advance, and Apple's predictions over the years have been mostly confirmed.
After the news broke, Mark Gurman, a well-known bloomberg journalist, confirmed it in a Tweet post on the same day and forwarded a comment on January 23: Almost all of the entire Apple Car management team left a year ago.
Source: Twitter
Mark Gurman said in the "Power On" column that Joe Bass, head of software engineering project management for Apple's automotive team, has left Apple to join Meta (formerly Facebook) as director of VR technology project management. With Bath leaving, the car management team Apple assembled a year ago has all but died, and the executives have left.
Gurman said bluntly that 2022 will be a key year that will determine the success or failure of Apple's car project. If Apple also plans to launch fully autonomous vehicles in 2025, they need to act as soon as possible, such as making fewer mistakes and reducing employee turnover.
A piece of news, which quickly caused discussions inside and outside the industry, in addition to the influence of Guo Mingxi himself, is the curiosity and expectation of the outside world for Apple's car.
Since Apple released iOS in Car (later renamed CarPlay) in 2013, the news of Apple's car manufacturing will appear in the public eye almost every year and be discussed by everyone. In 2014, Apple launched the "Project Titan"; in 2016, it took over the QNX team and its co-founder Dan Dodge, from vehicle development to autonomous driving solution development, and the project laid off 100 people; in 2017, it was approved for unmanned vehicle testing; in 2018, doug Field, former senior vice president of Tesla engineering, joined the team and became the leader; in 2019, Acquisition of self-driving startup Drive .ai; 2020, exposure to the supply chain; 2020, Doug Field jumped ship for Ford.
In these nearly 10 years, car building has long become a great story. According to public statistics, only 7 new car-making forces have received more than $18 billion in financing in 2020, more than three times that of 2019. In 2020, Ideal and Xiaopeng were successively listed on the US stock market, and on the day of listing, the opening price of Ideal and Xiaopeng rose by more than 40% compared with the issue price, and the market value exceeded 10 billion US dollars. As of the close of trading on March 18, Tesla's market value was $935.7 billion, more than Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors combined, allowing Musk to successfully become the world's richest man.
It seems that whether Apple makes a car or not, there will always be a legend of its car making on the rivers and lakes.
Radical and swinging: What kind of car does Apple want to build
On December 21, 2020, Li Xiang, founder of Ideal Auto, said bluntly in the WeChat circle of friends: "Smart electric vehicles (automatic driving), the two strongest players will soon enter the field." Exciting times! Two days later, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess announced on LinkedIn that Apple posed a higher challenge to Volkswagen than traditional rival Toyota.
Expecting, and fearing.
At the end of 2020, Taiwan media reported that Taiwan's key supply chain confirmed that Apple expected to release the Apple Car in September 2021, at least two years earlier than originally planned, and its prototype has been tested in California.
New car-making forces and traditional car giants see it as their most powerful competitor.
In an interview with the media last December, Cook revealed three areas that Apple is focusing on: artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR) and self-driving cars. In addition to AI, ar/VR headsets, hailed as Apple's next revolutionary product, have jumped tickets many times, and according to DigiTimes, they may be available as soon as the end of this year; while self-driving cars will be listed in 2025 with the dissolution of the team, there is great uncertainty about whether they can be listed in 2025.
In Gurman's view, the dissolution of Apple's automotive team was apple's realization of the difficulties of developing and manufacturing electric vehicles, so it decided to reduce the plan to the scale of only developing self-driving software. "In this case, the talents who were originally committed to Project Titan have fled, and it is reasonable to defect to Tesla."
According to the reporter's understanding, at the beginning of 2021, 4 senior leaders of Apple Automobile have left one after another, involving core departments such as robotics, autonomous vehicle safety and supervision, and sensors. In addition to the senior management, more than 100 engineers in the entire team were also poached by Meta.
The continuous loss of personnel, and most of them turn to other car companies to continue to engage in car manufacturing, it is difficult not to let the outside world wonder whether this is related to the slow progress of Apple car manufacturing.
In fact, apple's car-making story can be traced back to the time of Jobs. In 2010, Jobs not only met with martin Wendern, then CEO of Volkswagen Group, to discuss a product called "iCar", but even said publicly that "in the near future we are going to build a car".
Jobs believed that "cars have batteries, engines and mechanical structures, and they have them on the iPhone, and they even have engines." This has been interpreted by the outside world as Apple's car to take the road of "software + hardware" combination. The car-making concept first proposed by Apple was finally realized on the Tesla Model 3.
Source: Visual China
However, with the development of the second-generation iPhone on the agenda and the sudden death of Jobs in 2011, Apple's car-making plan was forced to be stranded. It wasn't until 2014 that a project code-named "Project Titan" was secretly launched within Apple, led by Steve Zadesky, the leader of the original iPod team, and the Apple car-making program was officially launched.
According to foreign media reports, at the beginning of the exposure of the "Titan Plan", Apple concentrated on hardware and was committed to manufacturing complete vehicles. In order to achieve his goal, Cook authorized Zadsky to build a 1,000-person car team and set up a car lab near the company's headquarters, constantly recruiting high-paying people from Google, Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, Ford and other companies.
In the year after the titan project was founded, according to LinkedIn's incomplete statistics, the number of the team increased to 1200 people, of which more than 300 people were from Tesla and more than 170 were from Ford.
The influx of talent has led the Apple automotive team to develop new technologies such as silent electric doors, car interiors without steering wheels or throttles, and AR displays. But integrating a team of more than 1,000 people is not an easy task, with project delays, internal conflicts and management problems frequent.
According to foreign media reports, the executives of the project team disagreed on whether Apple should give priority to building cars or developing software, and whether to develop self-driving cars or semi-autonomous vehicles, which led to Apple Car has not had a clear development path.
In January 2016, Zadwski, a supporter of vehicle manufacturing, announced his departure from Apple, and the Titan project was temporarily shelved. In July of the same year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple had rehired Bob Mansfield, a former senior vice president of hardware at Apple who had retired for four years, and the research and development direction of Titan's plan was officially changed from building complete vehicles to developing self-driving software. In the two months that followed, dozens of employees who had been in charge of vehicle manufacturing were laid off.
In April 2017, Apple received a road license for self-driving car testing in California. Since then, Cook has also publicly stated for the first time in an interview that Apple will focus on autonomous driving technology.
In August 2018, former Tesla vice president Doug Field was recruited by Apple to share the Titan program with Mansfield. Doug's addition is interpreted by the outside world as a signal that Apple has not given up on vehicle manufacturing. At that time, an engineer involved in the Titan program also revealed to the media that Apple was still working on developing an "Apple car" and was expected to go public from 2023 to 2025.
Until December 8, 2020, according to Bloomberg, Mansfield retired from Apple for the second time, and the head of the Titan team was urgently replaced by John Giannandrea, senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy at Apple, whose previous experience showed no background in hardware manufacturing.
After experiencing twists and turns such as layoffs, reshuffles, and car-building stranding, Apple Car restarted recruitment in 2020, releasing more than 300 positions a year, hoping to fill the vacancies in the Titan program and contact partners in many ways.
At this time, it has been 6 years since Apple launched the Titan plan, Tesla has touched the goal of annual sales of one million vehicles, and "Wei Xiaoli" is also approaching the annual sales mark of 100,000 vehicles.
With $250 billion in cash and a luxurious team, the Cook era of Apple seems to be going to make a big splash on the automotive track, but in September last year, Doug suddenly left Apple to join Ford, and the Apple car project ushered in its fifth leader, Kevin Lynch. In the past 8 years, the 4 leaders of the automobile project have left and thousands of employees have changed, and the outside world has found that Apple's outstanding global supply chain management capabilities and more than 100 automotive patent technologies have not fully exerted their advantages in car manufacturing.
As of now, what kind of car Apple wants to build, I don't know if it will change direction again.
Build a car with the name "Apple" written on it
What about Apple-built cars?
Battery technology: will make all the cells directly integrated together, eliminate the waste of space that exists between the various cells of the traditional battery pack, reduce the cost of the battery, and increase the vehicle endurance; automatic driving: the user can communicate with others in the car through the seat belt, and the sensors on the seat belt can also measure the passenger's vital signs, including heart rate, body temperature, blood alcohol content, etc.; intelligent body and cockpit: the door can slide, the vehicle can actively adjust the suspension, the bumper can be retracted, and the window can adjust the color according to the needs of the passenger 3. Reflectivity and transparency; intelligent experience: Apple's AR windshield can project driving information such as speed and navigation to the windshield, so that the driver can see the vehicle without looking down.
What apple car seat belts can achieve. Source: Patently Apple
The above four major conjectures about Apple Car are all functions that Apple Car may achieve in Apple's published patents. It will be a futuristic car that will subvert your imagination.
In addition to innovators, Apple has a nickname — control freak.
In order to avoid a foundry dominating the right to speak, Apple will often use a variety of ways to firmly occupy control and bargaining power, and acquisition of joint ventures, support for novices, patent control, and personnel stationing are all conventional options.
In the biography of Cook, it has been mentioned that in order to strengthen the control of the supply chain, Cook has persuaded suppliers to move to the vicinity of Apple's factory to make component delivery more efficient. After that, it invested in the most advanced enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and directly opened up the information system of parts suppliers, assembly plants and channels, from which the specific conditions of weekly sales forecasts, accurate inventory statistics of retail channels, ordering demand to outsourcing factories, whether inventory backlogs are too much, etc. Can be mastered and mobilized at any time.
However, car manufacturing is a very complicated thing, from the perspective of the industrial chain, the automobile industry chain is more closed and more verbose than mobile phones, so having a vehicle manufacturing platform is the core competitiveness of car manufacturing. On the one hand, it is reflected in the number of parts, such as as many as 30,000 parts of traditional fuel vehicles, and although the number of parts of electric vehicles is only 2/3 of that of fuel vehicles, it is still far more than mobile phones. On the other hand, it is reflected in the manufacturing capacity, mobile phones can slowly trial and error and iterate, and the cycle is relatively short, a few months or a year. However, the assembly capacity of the car is very demanding, because it involves safety issues, so the cycle is relatively long, usually 2 to 3 years.
Apple is no exception.
"Cross-border car manufacturing enterprises, most of the existing business growth is limited, and the growth certainty of the new energy automobile industry is visible, and the technological development is relatively mature, which is a breakthrough for them to get rid of the stock market and find new growth points." Sun Xing, a former soochow securities industry researcher, told reporters that although cross-border integration is now a trend, the challenges faced by enterprises are also great. "Cross-border car manufacturing is an industry with high risk, long cycle and low fault tolerance, even apples with rich industrial chains will face the same problems." The accumulation of technology and experience in building cars is insufficient, and the rhythm will be difficult to control. ”
In the past two years, the automotive circle has set off a vigorous car-making movement, Evergrande, Apple, Baidu, Didi, Xiaomi, OPPO, etc. have announced the entry of cars, although Huawei emphasizes not to build cars, the focus has been on automatic driving.
However, from the information revealed so far, several cross-border car manufacturers have been stuck in the mud. After Evergrande released 6 Hengchi new cars at one time in 2020, mass production and delivery time have always been a mystery; Didi and BYD jointly launched a customized online car D1, but the market response was flat; Baidu autonomous driving also went through 8 years, burning tens of billions of yuan a year, and still has not achieved profitability; relatively speaking, Xiaomi's progress is still relatively smooth, Lei Jun is recruiting non-stop, expanding the team, the latest news is on the Xiaomi investment day, Lei Jun revealed that "it is expected to be officially mass-produced in the first half of 2024."
"In terms of production costs and product reliability, it is difficult for these companies to stand on the same starting line with traditional car companies in the short term." Sun Xing said.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Doug said it's cool to start a car project from scratch, but it's also because the new project may lack long-term stamina and resources, making it difficult to build a car.
According to FT, several employees who have left the Titan program also said that Apple has not yet chosen a clear path forward.
According to reports from apple employees, even in the past few years, the auto team has been exploring two simultaneous paths: one with limited self-driving capabilities; the other with fully autonomous driving capabilities and without human intervention. But as early as the Mansfield era, he thought that under the conditions at that time, it was "almost impossible" to want Apple's first model to go directly to the L4 level of automatic driving system.
Kevin Lynch, who has just taken office, prefers to choose the second one, which has also led to the gradual loss of many employees in the auto project. It's worth noting that unlike the previous 4 principals, Kevin Lynch has neither expertise in hardware nor experience in the automotive field, he has been in charge of Apple Watch and health projects at Apple, and earlier was an Adobe executive.
In addition, according to the research report of market research agency Navigant, Apple also ranks at the bottom in the competitiveness of autonomous driving, and there is a clear gap with Google Waymo, GM, Baidu, etc.
Bernstein analyst Arndt Ellinghorst expressed his concerns in an interview with FT: "I just can't see where Apple will have the technological advantage. Apple cars may be self-driving, but the world is currently developing this technology. In this hard-to-make market, no advantage doesn't bode well. ”
Sasha Ostojic, a former engineer at Cruise, GM's self-driving arm, added: "When I was at Cruise, I interviewed a lot of people from Apple, including the Titans program staff. But most of them are disappointed with Apple's project, believing that most of its research is directionless and that they would rather participate in more serious projects. ”
How exactly Apple wants to build cars, what kind of cars to build - with the news of the dissolution of Apple's car team, doubts are once again shrouded in fog.
Resources:
《After seven years, an Apple car is still on the horizon》，FT
《Apple Car, With Wave of Recent Departures, Faces Make-or-Break 2022》，Bloomberg
《Apple Accelerates Work on Car Project, Aiming for Fully Autonomous Vehicle》，Bloomberg
Eye of the Storm | Under the "killing", apple cars can still be "scary", right? , PhoenixNet