Planning to roll over for 8 years? Apple is much harder to build a car than a mobile phone, expert: Porsche or OEM for it

Source of this article: Time Weekly Author: Tao Yajie

Apple's dream of building a car shattered?

On March 16, Guo Mingqi, a well-known analyst at Tianfeng Securities who was familiar with Apple's industrial chain, pointed out on Twitter that "the Apple auto team has been disbanded for a period of time, and in order to achieve the goal of mass production by 2025, Apple auto needs to be restructured within 3-6 months." Based on the accurate information about Apple's new products revealed by Guo Mingqi in the past, the news immediately triggered a hot discussion in the industry.

A few days later, however, things took a dramatic turn. Porsche CEO Oliver Blume said at the annual results video conference that Porsche has discussed "exciting joint projects" with Apple, Reuters reported on March 19.

"We've already partnered on CarPlay,"We're already working on CarPlay, and we're going to expand a bit more in the future." Oliver Blume says, "It's too early to make any conclusive conclusions about future projects. ”

At present, the development momentum of global electric vehicles is strong, and this field has also become a blue ocean for traditional car manufacturers, new car manufacturers and IT giants. According to data from Canalys, a technology industry analyst, global sales of electric vehicles (including all-electric and plug-in hybrid passenger cars) will be 6.5 million in 2021, up 109% from 2020 and accounting for 9% of all passenger car sales.

Compared with Apple's "in situ" performance, the performance of traditional car factory tycoons is eye-catching, according to Canalys data, SAIC and Volkswagen Group's annual sales exceed 300,000 vehicles, and the global market share is 7.0% and 4.9% respectively. BMW, Mercedes and SAIC Motor all sold more than 200,000 passenger cars a year, with global market shares of 4.2%, 3.5% and 3.5% respectively. Tesla Model 3 sold more than 500,000 vehicles in the whole year, ranking first, becoming the best-selling pure electric model for four consecutive years; Xiaopeng Automobile ranked 19th with sales of 98,600 vehicles, which is also the first time it has entered the top 20 of the year.

In the face of the strong background of traditional car companies and the breakthrough of new car-making forces, IT giants are not far behind. Recently, the news of Baidu and Geely's establishment of Jidu Automobile has been on the hot search; Ali cooperated with SAIC Motor two years ago to launch a new high-end automobile brand - "Zhiji Automobile"; Huawei has cast a wide net, creating a joint venture brand with BAIC and Changan, and carrying out digital cooperation with Dongfeng Honda and Jianghuai.

"In the face of fierce competition, even if the two cooperate, whether Porsche can take Apple cars out of the trough is still full of suspense." Zhang Xiaorong, president of the Institute of DeepIn Science and Technology, said.

The possibility of a powerful union

Founded in Stuttgart in 1931, Porsche is a luxury car brand owned by Volkswagen in Germany, and is famous in the world for producing high-end sports cars. According to the latest financial report, in 2021, Porsche delivered 301915 new cars to customers around the world, and the delivery volume exceeded the mark of 300,000 units for the first time, a record high. Among them, the best-selling models, the Macan and Cayenne, delivered 88,362 and 83,071 units respectively.

It is worth noting that the financial report also disclosed that 41,296 customers around the world received their first pure electric Porsche - Taycan. The Taycan is Porsche's first electric sports car launched in September 2019, and just two years later, Porsche has already achieved early profitability in electric vehicles.

At its 2021 earnings presentation, Porsche announced its ambitious 2030 target: by 2025, half of Porsche's new global deliveries are expected to be electrified, both electric and hybrid; by 2030, the proportion of pure electric models in new vehicle deliveries is expected to reach more than 80%.

In what ways might Porsche, which has both popularity and technology, work with Apple?

According to IT House, Porsche and Apple have worked closely together on a number of projects in the past. For example, adding Apple Music integration directly to infotainment systems, or developing CarPlay kits for classic models.

Financial commentator Wang Chikun told the Times Weekly reporter that compared with the companies that build cars out of the circle, Apple is still a catch-up and does not have much say. In order to have a place, it is a good way to intelligently empower and transform traditional car companies.

At present, Apple has made small achievements in the field of automotive software applications, including the launch of the in-vehicle system CarPlay, Apple Maps and speech recognition system, as well as sparing no effort to develop autonomous driving technology.

Automotive analyst Zhang Xiang told the Times Weekly reporter that the above technologies can provide intelligent support for Porsche and build a rich application ecology and intelligent platform.

"For Apple, Porsche's core technology and production line resources are invaluable. In the future, it is not excluded that Porsche will build cars for Apple. Zhang Xiang said.

Zhang Xiang expects that Apple cars are expensive, likely to exceed 500,000. Porsche's brand tone can be used as an endorsement to allow Apple cars to directly enter the mid-to-high-end market to achieve differentiated competition with friends.

A bumpy road to car building

In 2014, three years after Jobs's death, Apple released the titan plan, which is known in the tech industry, with the goal of creating an industry-disrupting automotive product from scratch. The project is dedicated to the manufacture of complete vehicles, led by steve Zadski, the leader of the original iPod team.

To achieve his goal, Cook authorized Zadński to build a 1,000-man automotive team and mobilized huge resources. In just half a year, engineers from Ford, Tesla, Mercedes-Benz and other car companies were gathered in the car-making team of the Titan plan.

No sooner had the team finished building than there was a huge disagreement within the Titans program. According to the AI Finance and Economics Agency of Finance and Economics Weekly, Apple executives have caused infighting on whether to prioritize vehicle manufacturing or low-level technology development, whether to achieve full automatic driving or initial semi-automatic driving, and also delayed the research and development process of Apple cars to a certain extent.

Because of the strategic disagreement at the top, the Titan plan was forced to shelve. In 2016, Steve Zadski, a supporter of vehicle manufacturing and former titan program chief, announced his departure from Apple.

In the same year, Apple switched from vehicle development to research on autonomous driving solutions, and the project laid off hundreds of people. Since then, Apple's car-making situation has been turbulent, and it has been difficult to retain them with high salaries, and project layoffs have become the norm.

Today, it has been 8 years since Apple officially announced the construction of the car. Apple has poached doug Field, a former head of engineering at Tesla, and John Giannandrea, a senior vice president at Google, and other senior talents in the automotive field, spending tens of billions of dollars, but still failing to find its own position.

"The crux of the problem may lie with Apple CEO Tim Cook." Zhang Xiaorong pointed out.

Zhang Xiaorong continued that Cook is a master of business operations, but not a product master like Jobs. To operate a product, it only needs to be continuously improved on the basis of the original, so that it can adapt to different market environments to achieve growth. The logic of product design is completely different, automotive product design needs to be innovative, need to have a strong leader, with musk's talent as an engineer. Obviously, there is still a big gap between Cook and Musk.

More often, the automotive industry is considered to have a very high threshold, and it involves safety issues, and the process will be more closed, lengthy and rigorous.

An Guangyong, an expert of the Credit Management Committee of the All-Union Mergers and Acquisitions Association, pointed out in an interview with the Times Weekly reporter that although Apple does not lack funds, talents and popularity, it needs more conditions to enter the automotive field, even including the seemingly virtual element of car-making genes. Therefore, for Apple's cross-border car, it is difficult to make a difference.

2022 is a success or failure?

Apple once said that it will "launch a fully autonomous car in 2025", but now that it is less than three years, will Apple cars still have a chance to stand in the spotlight?

Bloomberg reporter Mark Gullman bluntly said in the "Power On" column that 2022 will be a key year to determine the success or failure of Apple's car project. They need to act as quickly as possible, make fewer mistakes, and reduce employee turnover.

In Gurman's view, the reason why Apple Cars came to the current situation where the team was disbanded was because Apple realized the difficulty of developing and manufacturing electric vehicles, so it decided to reduce the plan to the scale of only developing self-driving software.

In an interview with the media in December last year, Cook revealed three areas of focus: artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR) and self-driving cars, according to China Entrepreneur.

"It can be seen that Apple has completely abandoned the idea of vehicle manufacturing and focused on the research and development of software applications." Zhang Xiang pointed out.

At present, there are two main models of cross-border car manufacturing. One model is represented by Tesla, Weilai Automobile, and Xiaopeng Automobile, who master the vehicle manufacturing resources, have their own factories, and carry their own software and hardware. Another model is represented by Huawei and Baidu, most of whom are only responsible for software design, user experience and other aspects, and cars are manufactured by foundries.

Zhang Xiang believes that automobiles are heavy asset industries, and the initial investment is very large, and the threshold is also very high. In order to ensure profit margins, Apple will most likely also take the route of Huawei's car manufacturing, find car companies to oem, empower with software, and make up for the shortcomings of others with its own strengths.

While the prospects for Apple's car are uncertain, the Apple Car's proposed performance of "providing better hardware, software and service integration" and "significantly better than that of ordinary electric vehicles" illustrates more possibilities.

The original core function of the car is to travel, solving the problem of people moving from point A to point B. People's biggest demand for cars is that in the process of moving, the car has good power mechanical properties and sufficient safety and comfort. In the future, in addition to being used for travel, cars will also be mobile spaces, mobile computing terminals, mobile energy terminals, and even mobile robots...

Internet observer Zhang Shule told the Times Weekly reporter that Apple's IOS ecology, huge application inventory, and a large number of application creation teams around the world will become a breakthrough force for Apple to build smart car cabins and other application scenarios. Once the car is made, apple cars, which rely on a powerful operating system and rich ecology, will once again achieve a general definition similar to that of smartphones.