Written by | Song Yuting
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 3-6 months.
Because the analyst tracked Apple-related content for many years, after it exposed this news, it instantly became a hot news in the industry.
On the same day, Mark Gurman, a well-known bloomberg reporter, confirmed in a Tweet post and retweeted a comment on January 23: Almost all of Apple Car management team left a year ago.
In recent years, the electric vehicle industry is in a barbaric growth period, and everyone wants to become a "pig" that can take off casually at the outlet, so are traditional companies, new forces are making cars, and so are crossovers such as Xiaomi and Apple.
As early as the beginning of last year, Apple's car-making team was exposed to the news of a number of executives leaving and jumping to Companies such as Meta, including the person in charge of autonomous driving, vehicle software and hardware, and even Doug Field, vice president of the car-making project.
At the end of last year, there were reports that Apple wanted to set up a factory in the United States to produce batteries in order to prevent a potential crisis caused by tensions between the United States and China, but unfortunately encountered a bottleneck.
At that time, people familiar with the matter revealed that Apple cars will be launched as early as 2025, but according to today's negotiation impasse, this plan may change.
In fact, since the exposure of Apple's car project "Titan" in 2014, it has attracted close attention from the industry.
In the past 7 years, Apple's related patents have been continuously exposed, and in the middle of 2020, Apple has announced nearly 70 automotive-related patents, and there have been more than 100 patents so far. In addition to automotive intelligence-related patents such as on-board systems and autonomous driving, it also includes motors, suspension systems, lights, vehicle floors, window glass heating, vehicle navigation, bumpers, etc.
In 2021, there are frequent news that Apple will visit the supply chain of Japan and South Korea, and even use modern electric vehicle platforms to build cars, which further raises the expectations of the outside world for Apple cars.
Although it did not work out in the end, there are various indications that Apple's car-making ambitions do not stop at intelligent interaction, and everyone is waiting to see if Apple can create a new species of car that subverts Tesla.
Unfortunately, Apple's attitude towards car building has not been firm, although in an interview with the media in December last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed three major areas that Apple is focusing on: artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR) and self-driving cars.
However, according to foreign media reports, the executives of the project team disagreed on whether Apple should give priority to building cars or prioritizing the development of software, and whether to develop self-driving cars or semi-autonomous vehicles, which led to Apple Car has not been a clear development path.
During the leadership of Bob Mansfield, Apple's chief hardware engineer, the goal of Apple's car was to build an autonomous driving system; after Doug Field was recruited by Apple from Tesla, the team's research and development direction was adjusted to vehicle research and development; after John Giannandrea was recruited by Apple from Google to take charge of machine learning and AI strategic tasks, the main task of Apple's car seems to have changed back to building an autonomous driving system.
Not only is the attitude not firm, in the field of automatic driving, Apple's performance is not excellent, and there is a significant gap with head players such as Waymo and Xiaoma Zhixing.
Last month, major self-driving companies submitted test reports for the whole year to the California DMV. Among them, Apple's self-driving test total mileage ranked 14th, slightly mediocre.
Up to now, the speculation about Apple Car has not stopped, but Apple car is always thunderous and rainy, and after several team changes, the challenge is huge, with the news of the dissolution of the team, what car Apple wants to build, whether it can successfully build a car, is still unknown.
It can only be said that the development of the automobile market to the present, the pattern has gradually stabilized, in the differentiation space reduction, innovation in the current situation, leaving apple time, space has not much. 【iDailycar】