Text/Wang Junliang
Apple cars, it seems, are going to be cold again. Recently, the famous analyst Guo Mingji broke the news, "Apple's auto project team has long been disbanded!" "Even if Apple sets up a team right now, and if all goes well, it won't be mass production until 2025 at the earliest."
It has been eight years since 2014 when apple was announced to build a car. Eight years ago, China did not have a new car-making force, eight years ago, Musk was still a nameless generation in the automotive industry, but now, Tesla's annual sales have approached one million units, Weilai, Xiaopeng and other new Chinese cars have approached the annual sales of 100,000 units, and Apple Motors eight years later, the news of team dissolution. What went wrong with Apple's car? Why can't its car be built for a long time?
In my opinion, one of the most critical problems is that Apple wants to give everyone a "surprise" too much.
Apple mobile phone, ah, is indeed very shocking, almost every press conference can be a sensation in the industry. So in the construction of cars, Apple also hopes to launch a "cross-era car". So we saw that when Apple set up the project in 2014, the expectations for this car were very high, and it was said that the car to be built not only did not have a steering wheel, but also did not have a gas pedal, and it could be driven without user intervention at all. It is not only necessary to "better integrate hardware, software and services", but also to position "high-end" and "significantly better than ordinary electric vehicles".
For Apple, if it can't come up with disruptive innovation products, if it can't lead the industry, it means failure.
The problem is that we haven't seen the word disruptive innovation in Apple for a long time. To put it bluntly, today's Apple's small innovations are continuous, but there are almost no disruptive products. Cook is a good businessman, but by no means a fanciful product manager. Can he lead the team to make a product from scratch to one across the ages? There's a question mark here.
The second problem apple faces is that it has been difficult to find suppliers. For Apple, it has always hoped to copy its research and development and production model in the field of mobile phones to the car, and it has full control of the technology and hand over the production to the OEM. But the search for this "foundry" has not been so smooth.
So far, Apple has negotiated with at least six automakers, including BMW, Daimler, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Hyundai, but these automakers have all refused to cooperate. It may be that they are not willing to become Apple's foundry.
On the other hand, the established suppliers are hot-faced. For example, Foxconn, last year, Foxconn released three electric vehicles in one go, and at the beginning of this year, it established a joint venture with Geely to manufacture complete vehicles and parts, and the company also said that it was building factories in the United States and Mexico, and planned to produce electric vehicles in North America in 2023. The same idea as Foxconn is Luxshare Precision, which is also one of Apple's top suppliers in China. Last month, Luxun established a joint venture with Chery to officially enter the car manufacturing industry and claimed to have the ability to output product design and research and development.
But the problem is that in the matter of car manufacturing, Foxconn and Luxun Precision are new to the industry, although they have long been involved in the field of automobile supply, but they lack experience in vehicle manufacturing, and Apple needs traditional manufacturers like Hyundai.
At present, Apple's performance in finding a foundry partner is the same as that of an older leftover woman. Those who are willing to work for Apple, Apple can't see it; Apple's favorite big factory can't look at it.
Of course, in addition to these two points, Apple also has problems in the project itself, the specific performance is that the direction of research and development is uncertain, and the goal is repeatedly jumped. In 2014, when the Titans were just announced, the first person in charge, Apple's vice president of product design, wanted to develop a car with advanced driver assistance features. But Apple's chief designer disagrees, wanting to build a fully autonomous driving platform. Even in public, if Apple wants to get a car, it has to have no steering wheel.
This is actually a battle of two routes, one is heavy software, one is a combination of soft and hard that Apple is good at, or one is to be a self-driving software company, and the other is to be a car company. Two people quarreled, in 2016 both people left, Apple sent a retired former executive to take charge of the project, his direction is also to take the road of software development, but the problem is less than two years, he left again, leading the Model 3 mass production of the former Tesla senior vice president of engineering, and became the person in charge. As a result, Apple returned to the route of vehicle manufacturing. Since then, Apple has changed several people in charge, and the direction has been changing, which obviously affects the progress of the project.
At present, it seems that the advent of Apple cars is still far away, to know that new energy vehicles are in a stage of rapid development, a little slower will be caught up, even Jia Yueting, who made PPT cars, has made a decent FF91, and Apple, which has money and technology, has not even built a car shell. Apple, which likes to hold back big moves, whether this time is up early in the morning and catches a late set, let's wait and see.