After the car-making team was revealed by Guo Ming-chi that it had been disbanded for a period of time, Apple was cue-built again.
In the "Most Trusted Self-Driving R&D Car Brands" survey conducted by AutoPacific, Apple, which was rumored to have built a car eight years ago but has not yet launched a model, rushed into the top six.
Source: AutoPacific
"Look at the current auto industry, this is a tragedy in the United States, who designed these cars?"
Apple's rumored car may have originated from Jobs's complaint at the earliest.
Apple makes cars - the wind is loud and the rain is small
In fact, according to Tony Fadell, a former senior vice president of Apple, in 2008 they began to discuss the functions of Apple-branded cars and the design of the car's dashboard, but the project was shelved due to the subsequent economic crisis.
In 14 years, three years after Jobs's death, the car-making project code-named "Titan Project" was launched by the new CEO Cook, and in 15 years, the size of Apple's car-making project team reached 1500 people in rumors.
Some fans even uploaded renderings of Apple-brand cars based on apple-applied car-related patents, and the through-style large screen showed the Final Fantasy of Apple's car-making - a mobile Internet terminal that can carry people.
Unfortunately, the ideal is very full, and the reality is very bone.
With the repeated jumps in the project's business: from vehicle manufacturing to autonomous driving and then to vehicle manufacturing. In January this year, Joe Bass, the head of software engineering management of Apple's automotive team, was blown out of office.
Since then, the early management of the project has all left, coupled with the dissolution of the team revealed by Apple's gold analyst Guo Mingxi, the car is likely to be out of the market in these two years.
The repeated jumps in Apple's car-making business are not unrelated to repeated setbacks in finding foundries.
When Apple thought about building cars, times changed
According to the first financial report, before Apple negotiated with Hyundai Motor, it also found Mercedes-Benz, Daimler and other companies. It is rumored that Nissan Automobile is also within the scope of Apple's OEM negotiations, but so far Apple does not seem to have found a suitable car company to cooperate.
According to foreign media reports, part of the reason why the "Titan Plan" was stranded in 2016 was that the giants such as BMW, Daimler, Toyota, and Volkswagen rejected the olive branch extended by Apple.
Apple may not realize that becoming a "fruit chain" in the era when the iPhone occupies an absolute market is indeed a fat gap that must be grabbed by squeezing the head.
However, in the case of Tesla's dominance, new power car companies are eyeing the tiger, and traditional car giants have transformed, the new energy vehicle market is not a mobile phone word of mouth alone can be squeezed in.
Compared with Apple's foundries, car companies are more willing to become Apple's partners. This is not unrelated to Apple's seamless control of the supply chain.
Becoming a "fruit chain" means that, in addition to confidentiality agreements and process requirements, Apple also enjoys privileges in parts negotiation and priority supply.
Before the outbreak of the epidemic, there were media reports that TSMC cut 20% of Huawei's orders in order to give priority to Apple.
In fact, Apple's main foundry Foxconn, the core suppliers Ofsa Technology, Goertek technology, did not tie up in the main business, but early to seek transformation.
Seventeen-year layout Foxconn pushes MIH electrification platform
Foxconn ran the earliest and fastest.
In March this year, Foxconn's first electric vehicle Model T was officially delivered to Kaohsiung Passenger Transport and will soon be put into operation.
The electric bus, along with the Model C and Model E, two other electric vehicles launched by Foxconn in 21 years, comes from the MIH platform developed by Foxconn's parent company Hon Hai Technology Group.
For this electric platform, Hon Hai Technology Group began to lay out as early as seventeen years ago.
In 2005, Foxconn acquired Aetna Electric, one of the four major automobile wiring harness factories in Taiwan, and since then, Foxconn has also provided automotive electronic components such as wiring harnesses, rearview mirrors, and central control displays for first-line car brands such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Tesla, and Porsche.
In 2015, the same year that NIO was founded. Foxconn joined hands with Tencent and Harmony Automobile to establish Harmony Futeng. However, the two-line strategy of parallel production of affordable cars and high-end models is costly, and the production qualification of passenger cars has not yet arrived, and this huge car-making action has ended with Foxconn's divestment.
It is worth noting that Harmony Futeng did not close down due to divestment, and after changing its name to Byton, it signed an agreement with Foxconn in January 2021 to "renew the frontier" and sign an agreement to promote the production of the first model, the M-Byte.
Foxconn's car-making ambitions re-emerged at Hon Hai Technology Day in 2020, with Hon Hai Chairman Liu Yangwei declaring: "Tesla is the iPhone in electric vehicles, and Foxconn hopes to become an Android in the field of electric vehicles."
In the past two years, Foxconn has attacked with multiple threads, first going deep into the car manufacturing market through car companies, and has signed strategic agreements with Byton and Geely.
Through the joint venture company to deepen the software field, the Stellantis Group established a joint venture mobile Drive to develop connected car functions and services.
Factories have blossomed everywhere to open up the upstream, middle and lower reaches of automobile manufacturing supply chains. Foxconn has a joint venture with state-owned oil group PTT in Thailand to produce electric vehicles and set up a chip factory in India. In March, the media reported that Foxconn planned to build a battery pack, battery and energy storage system factory at a new plant in southern Taiwan.
Luxshare Precision, which became famous for providing connectors for Apple, has always followed in foxconn's footsteps.
In 11 years, Luxshare wire harness manufacturing cut into the automotive supply chain, winning orders from CAR companies such as FAW and Chery; two years later, it acquired SUK, the core supplier of BMW and Mercedes-Benz, and entered the luxury car supply chain.
In February 2022, Luxshare Precision announced that it had signed an agreement with Chery Automobile to acquire part of Chery's equity for RMB 10.054 billion. Subsequently, Luxun announced that it plans to raise no more than 13.5 billion yuan for a total of six projects and supplementary working capital in the consumer electronics and automotive sectors.
The same as the "fruit chain", Goertek is not far behind, in the first three quarters of 2021, Goertek shares to achieve revenue of 52.79 billion yuan, an increase of 52% year-on-year. The rapid growth in share value is a visual reflection of Goertek's development of its VR business.
According to industry chain research data, Goertek's customers include Facebook, Sony, HTC and Pico, etc. In addition to Apple's foundry, Goertek is still the exclusive foundry of Quest2 and Sony PS VR.
"Fruit chain" seeks transformation, similar to the current reasons for the transformation of mobile phone companies to build cars, the competition in the mobile phone industry has long entered the stock stage, and entering the fields of automotive electronics, VR and other fields is not only as simple as taking orders from manufacturers, but also getting rid of the OEM model, cutting from the meager profits of foundry into the technical field and mastering the possibility of core competitiveness.
Luxun and Foxconn layout car manufacturing, in order to seize the opportunity of Apple's car manufacturing, the possibility of continuing to become an Apple brand car foundry is not without, but for Foxconn, which hopes to become "Android in the field of electric vehicles", it is obviously too unwilling.
But how to choose the "fruit chain" ultimately depends on the biggest variable of Apple's car, to see whether Apple can still launch the era and breakthrough works.
For us, it is better to guess whether Foxconn's electric sedan will be available before Apple!