Author | Wang He
Edit | Pan Lei
Image source | TimCook Weibo
"WEILAI needs to have a certain ability to resist blows and impacts before Apple's shock wave arrives."
Not long ago, Weilai founder Li Bin said in an interview column that if Apple successfully launches a car, it will definitely be positioned in the mainstream high-end market, and under the influence of Apple's user ecology and brand power, Apple's cars will have strong competitiveness.
Although seen as a fierce rival by the new car-making power, Apple's car seems to be heading to the end.
Tianfeng International Securities analyst Guo Mingji said in a Tweet post that Apple's auto project team has been disbanded for some time. If you want to mass-produce apple cars in 2025, you need to reorganize your team in 3 to 6 months.
Previously, he had predicted the launch of Apple cars several times, 2025, 2027, and even 2028.
Although Guo Mingji's revelations have yet to be examined, it is an indisputable fact that Apple has not built a car in 8 years since the start of the car-making plan in 2014.
"The slow progress of Apple's car manufacturing may also be related to technical barriers, internal interest games, management team building, and partner matching." Yu Qingjiao, secretary general of the Zhongguancun New Battery Technology Innovation Alliance and chairman of the Battery Hundred People Association, told Chuang Chuangbang.
Ma Jihua, founder and chief analyst of Darui Consulting, told Chuangbang that Apple has not been active in building cars, the attitude of high-level swaying left and right, and only relying on the media intermittently exposed the progress of car building, Apple cars seem to be far from landing.
Project Titan
If Jobs had been alive, there might have been a car called the iCar.
One day in 2007, Jobs met with then-Volkswagen GROUP CEO Vindell to discuss the idea of an iCar.
"We've had a couple of conversations. Let's talk about what it would be like if we were to develop a car. What will the dashboard look like? What does the seat look like? What does power look like? Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive and nest founder, also confirmed that he had exchanged ideas with Jobs on car design several times.
A year later, the media exposed a car with an iPhone next to it, which was the earliest prototype of the iCar.
Unfortunately, Jobs eventually decided to shelve iCar's development plans.
At that time, the U.S. auto industry was on the verge of collapse after the subprime mortgage crisis, and Apple was busy promoting the iPhone as a mainstream product. Jobs is still looking at the TV industry, and he thinks Apple's TV will be one of the best-selling products.
In 2011, Jobs died, Detroit's auto industry began to recover, the three major auto groups of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler in the United States gradually came out of the trough, and Silicon Valley technology companies such as Uber and Alphabet gradually began to enter the automobile and even travel industry.
Apples are naturally not willing to be left behind. In 2013, Apple announced its entry into the connected car field, releasing the "iOSin the car" in-vehicle system (later renamed CarPlay), with Ferrari, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz becoming its first partners.
In 2014, Apple's car-making program was officially launched, quietly opening a car-making project code-named "Project Titan", with Steve Zadesky, the leader of the original iPod team, as the head.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple has set up an automobile research and development center, and the car project code name is "Titan Project" to focus on the development of driverless smart cars.
At that time, Apple recruited experts from Google, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla and other companies to form a luxury car research and development team. Statistics show that within a year after its establishment, the R&D team gathered more than a thousand engineers to participate, of which more than 300 former Tesla employees.
In 2015, Apple began to speed up car manufacturing, registered three domain names of "apple.car", "apple.cars" and "apple.auto", recruited automotive and software engineers in a big way, and recruited senior executives such as auto safety systems and transmission systems from Google, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla and other companies with high salaries, ready to do a big job.
Swaying left and right, the road is built
In fact, regarding the car-making route, Apple has oscillated between building the whole car and developing autonomous driving technology, and even broke out a dispute over the car-making route.
Zadski chose the route of building the whole car, and in his eyes, the top priority of the Titan plan is to find a good partner to develop a semi-autonomous vehicle product.
Jonathan Ive, Apple's design director at the time, pushed the self-driving technology route, stressing that what titan plans to build is a fully autonomous driving platform for future mobility.
Apple CEO Tim Cook eventually chose to support Jonathan Ive. Cook believes that in the future, software will become an important part of the car, and autonomous driving will become more important, so Apple will focus on the research and development of self-driving technology.
In 2016, a letter from Apple to the U.S. Department of Transportation announced the end of the dispute over Apple's car route.
According to the letter, Apple will not build a complete self-driving car like Tesla, but will focus on the research and development of self-driving software technology, and the hardware part of the car is likely to choose the way to cooperate with existing car manufacturers.
However, traditional car companies are obviously reluctant to use their production capacity to make wedding clothes for Apple cars.
Japan's "Nikkei Shimbun" reported that Apple has at least negotiated with 6 car companies, including BMW, Daimler, Toyota, and Volkswagen, but 6 car companies have refused to cooperate with Apple.
In desperation, Apple had to all in the automatic driving system.
In April 2017, Apple received a DMV (Vehicle Authority) license from the U.S. State of California to test autonomous vehicles on public roads. The license covers 3 Lexus RX450h SUVs and 6 safety drivers.
Since 2018, Apple, which has achieved certain results in automatic driving, seems to have not given up vehicle manufacturing and recruited relevant talents.
Doug Field, apple's vice president of mac hardware engineering, was rehired back to Apple after five years at Tesla to take charge of Apple's Titan project. Field was already a senior vice president of engineering at Tesla and chief automotive engineer at the Model 3.
After Field, Michael Schwekutsch, vice president of Tesla's electric drive system, and Steve MacManus, vice president of research and development for Tesla's interior and exterior, also joined Apple.
However, for Apple, 2018 was also a difficult year.
The earnings report shows that in the fourth quarter of 2018, Apple's smartphone fell into a sharp decline rarely seen in many years.
IDC data shows that in the fourth quarter of 2018, China's smartphone shipments, Huawei, OPPO, vivo have achieved growth, while Apple and Millet have seen a large degree of decline.
IDC pointed out that the reason for this situation is that the unit price of Apple products is too high, coupled with the severe domestic smartphone market environment, it is still impossible to stop the decline in the end.
Weak smartphone sales forced Cook to lead Apple to six major transformations, including self-driving cars. But Apple is beginning to seek to focus on AI technology in a broader area, not just through projects like self-driving cars.
As a result, the Titan project team was restructured, with Doug Field cutting 200 employees from the team, some of whom were redistributed to Apple's artificial intelligence division.
The restructured Titans team also did not achieve satisfactory results.
According to the California Vehicle Authority, between December 2018 and November 2019, Apple's self-driving fleet experienced 64 disengagements out of 7,544 miles in California, equivalent to 8.5 disengagements per thousand miles. By comparison, in 2018, Apple recorded a whopping 69,510 departures, 871.65 departures per thousand miles, ranking low among the 28 companies that conducted self-driving tests on California roads.
In order to reverse the unfavorable situation of backward technology, Apple continues to invest heavily in car manufacturing.
Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty expects Apple to spend nearly $19 billion on car research and development in 2020, compared with $80 billion to $100 billion spent on research and development in the auto industry as a whole.
But since then, Apple cars have disappeared.
When Apple's car appeared in the public eye again, it was the news that in the 9 months of 2021, 5 executives of the Titan team had left.
In February 2021, Apple's senior sensor manager Benjamin Lyon switched to aerospace technology company Astra as chief engineer; also in February, Jamie Weido, head of Apple's self-driving car safety and regulation team, moved to startup Cavnue as chief technology officer.
In May, Dave Scott, head of Apple's robotics team, joined healthcare company Hyperfine as CEO; in September, Apple Titan Program Director Doug Field moved to Ford as chief technology officer and embedded systems officer. In November, Soonho Ahn, Apple's global head of batteries, left to join Volkswagen's PowerCo battery division.
Apple to the left, Xiaomi to the right
During the period when the executives of the Apple Titan team left, Xiaomi, Apple's main rival in the mobile phone market, entered the field of car manufacturing.
"I decided to lead the team myself, and it was the last major entrepreneurial project of my life. I know what it means to make a decision, and I am willing to put on all the accumulated records and reputation in my life to fight for Xiaomi Cars. Xiaomi Chairman Lei Jun said at the Xiaomi Spring New Product Launch Conference on March 30, 2021.
From March to August 2021, Xiaomi has invested in a number of companies in the intelligent electric vehicle industry chain such as Longitudinal Technology and Honeycomb Energy, involving multiple segments such as autonomous driving solutions and power batteries, and completed the construction of Xiaomi's automobile supply chain.
Driven by Lei Jun, Xiaomi Auto expects to achieve mass production of its first car in 2024, and will choose between SUVs and cars, with a price of between 100,000 and 300,000.
At the intersection of car building, Apple, who is hesitant to move forward, and Xiaomi, who has done its best, have gone in two different directions.
"Apple has not yet determined whether it wants to build a car or 'help car companies build good cars' like Huawei." Xiaomi has a clear positioning for car building, and acts quickly, concentrating all resources to build cars. Yu Puritan said.
Ma Jihua believes that Lei Jun's concept is basically similar to Jobs' concept, using screens as a series and eating from large and small screens. And Cook is obviously more focused on the peripheral products of smartphones, including smart watches and so on. Conceptually, Xiaomi Lei Jun wants to build a smart ecology with the screen as the link, and Apple Cook wants to build a smart ecology centered on smart phones.
At present, Xiaomi has established cooperation with most new energy vehicle companies. For example, the Xiaomi watch can be used as the smart remote control of the owner of weilai, the xiaomi mobile phone can act as the car key of Xiaopeng and BYD, and the owner of the Wei carriage can control his own Xiaomi smart home device in the car.
In contrast, Apple, its CarPlay and Appstore provide a shortcut for Apple's ecology to enter the automotive industry.
Apple launched CarPlay in 2014, a car software that embeds an iPhone into a car dashboard. With CarPlay, iPhone users can access apps, open maps or send text messages while driving.
Apple's official data shows that more than 80% of new cars sold worldwide in 2020 support CarPlay, and at least 600 models support CarPlay.
Apple is trying to build its own in-car experience ecosystem around the drivers, and began using its Appstore platform to encourage software developers to optimize car applications, including functions such as finding charging piles, ordering food and finding parking spaces.
Perhaps in Cook's eyes, CarPlay's successful use in various types of cars can become a model for his promotion of autonomous driving systems. Although the self-driving business is more complex than CarPlay.
However, Ma Jihua also pointed out that Xiaomi and Apple are in different countries, and their industrial living environment is also different. In the United States, there are already car-making giants like Tesla, and other companies may also participate but will never forcefully roll in to divide the cake. But in China, it is completely different, whether it is Xiaomi or Tencent, they like to rely on their own advantages in other people's mature industries and spare no effort to divide the cake.
"From this point of view, Tesla's success actually marks the closure of the window for Apple's car." Ma Jihua said.
Yu Qingjiao believes that from a global point of view, the market penetration rate of new energy vehicles is still very low, the competition pattern is changeable, Apple just lost the first-mover advantage, and there are still many possibilities in the future.
Dramatically, after the news of the dissolution of the team broke, Apple received two new patents for the Titan project for the future of electric vehicle systems. Porsche's CEO also said that the company's executives traveled to the United States late last year to discuss the possibility of cooperation with Apple and other technology companies.
Does this mean that Apple has still not given up on building cars?
Ma Jihua believes that in the future, smart cars will become more and more like large smart phones, and their industrial structure will be similar, and the possibility of Apple's deep participation in the automobile industry still exists, but the possibility of whether to independently build Apple cars is decreasing. There is no long-term prosperity of technology companies, and Apple cannot escape the cycle law.
In the puritan view, Apple's car-making team has also been dissolved before, this dissolution, the next time there may be a reorganization of the team, as a technology company, even if it does not build a car, Apple will continue to lay out patents.
Why did the car fail?
After 8 years of burning countless money, executives leaving, team restructuring, today's Apple cars seem to have only one legend left.
"Apple's mobile phone business is still very strong, the stock price has been hitting a new high, there is no need for market value management, there is no need to follow the trend of car." Ma Jihua said.
Canalys data shows that in the fourth quarter of 2021, Samsung ranked first in the world with nearly 275 million smartphone shipments, maintaining a market share of 20%. Driven by the new iPhone series, Apple ushered in a new high in performance, with annual shipments reaching 230 million units, an increase of 11% year-on-year, ranking second.
With the iPhone 13 series starting to reduce prices, and the upcoming 618 shopping festival, Apple's sales may return to the world's first in the future.
The mobile phone business has soared, and Apple's market value has reached a new high.
As the world's first technology company with a market capitalization of more than $1 trillion, in early January 2022, Apple's stock price reached $182.88, and its market value exceeded $3 trillion (about 19 trillion yuan) for the first time, more than 10 times the total property of Musk, the world's richest man.
Ma Jihua also pointed out that as the world's most influential technology company, Apple's innovation ability is actually drying up, it is already in a conservative state, and the exploration of new industries is getting smaller and smaller.
In September 2021, Apple officially released the flagship phone of the iPhone 13 series, and claimed that the iPhone 13 Pro series brought ProMotion high refresh rate screen technology for the iPhone for the first time, supporting 120Hz ProMotion adaptive refresh rate.
However, Apple was soon ridiculed by its old rival Samsung. Samsung said through the official Twitter: "We have been supporting 120Hz refresh rates for some time..."
Back in March 2020, Samsung used a 120Hz display for the first time in the Galaxy S20 series.
Sun Yanbiao, president of the First Mobile Phone Industry Research Institute, said that the form of the straight-panel mobile phone was created by Apple, but since then there have been few exclusive Apple's scientific and technological innovations. Moreover, in addition to this, Apple's mobile phone seems to change a little bit of appearance and function every year, and then it begins to innovate, and then it is to rely on new products to win, which can be described as a trick and eat all over the world.
Economist Song Qinghui told Chuangbang that the delay in apple car manufacturing is related to the lack of disruptive innovation and the refusal to buy Tesla on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is also related to factors such as too high market expectations and difficulty in achieving mass production.
Previously, Tesla encountered a bottleneck in mass production of model 3, the company was only a month away from bankruptcy, for a time Musk slept in the factory every day, once asked to meet with Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple's acquisition of Tesla, but Cook refused this meeting.
If it is Jobs's decade to have product foresight and surpass consumer perception from product experience, then Cook's decade has focused on supply chain, distribution, finance and marketing.
In addition, in the view of puritanism, the failure of Apple to build cars is certainly related to technical barriers.
At present, the manufacturing of intelligent electric vehicles has a certain threshold, and the technical accumulation, talent reserves, various production and manufacturing cooperation systems and huge upstream and downstream supply chains of traditional car companies in the industry need to be accumulated for a long time.
"There are many reasons why Apple's car construction has failed, and the root cause is that compared with mobile phones, cars are very complicated and cannot be solved by finding a supplier." Song Qinghui said.