Although the iCar will be late, it will not be absent?
Author | Home scale from the planet Magnesia
Executives leave, teams disband... Just when everyone thought that Apple's "car-making dream" had been shattered, multiple messages from the supply chain forcibly gave "Apple Car" a life.
First, Bloomberg broke the news that Apple had recruited Desi Ujkashevic, an executive who had worked for Ford for 31 years; then it was rumored that Foxconn's parent company, Hon Hai Group, would be responsible for Apple's foundry business.
It seems that "everything is available, only mass production is owed", so does Apple Really have hope?
The team was "disbanded"?
On the evening of March 15, well-known analyst Guo Mingji broke the news on Twitter: Apple's car team has been disbanded for some time. If you want to mass-produce Apple Car in 2025, you must reorganize your team within 3 to 6 months.
For this news, netizens do not seem to be surprised, because from February 2021, Apple car team executives have left.
According to statistics, in the period from 2014 to 2021, the ambitious Apple car project has gathered 14 technical giants, of which 11 are the main leaders of the team, they have transferred from within, and have high salaries to poach from competitors. But in just one year, 7 of these core members left the Apple car team, almost on the verge of "disbanding".
On the other hand, Guo Mingxi's revelation has always been equivalent to "official announcement" in the hearts of fruit fans, which naturally deepens the pessimism of the outside world.
But looking at the recent news, we can still find some clues: On February 22, Apple worked with a South Korean outsourced semiconductor assembly and testing (OSAT) company to develop chip modules and packages for the Apple Car. The project, which began last year and is led by Apple Korea, is expected to be completed in 2023. According to another supply chain source, apple had put forward stocking requirements to Taiwan auto parts factories such as Heda, Trade Union-KY, Heqin, and Futian at the end of 2021, and listed related companies in the first batch of suppliers. These events seem to contradict "Apple stopped building cars".
If we dig deeper and go back to Project Titan itself, we can find that the struggle between self-driving lines and vehicle lines runs through the entire development of the program.
A battle of lines that sway left and right
If Jobs had been alive, iCar might have been possible a long time ago.
Back in 2007, Jobs met with then-Volkswagen CEO Vindell to discuss the idea of iCar. But at the time of the low ebb of the U.S. auto industry, iCar's development plans were forced to be shelved. It wasn't until the third year after Jobs's death that the mysterious "Titan Project" began to quietly open, headed by Steve Zadesky, the leader of the original iPod team, and more than a thousand engineers from Google, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla and other companies.
There is no doubt that Zadesky developed a car product exactly according to Jobs's wishes. But his colleague, Apple's design director Jony Ive, pushed the self-driving technology route, and in the face of route selection, Apple CEO Tim Cook finally supported the self-driving technology route. He 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.
This route dispute caused the first major change in the Apple car team, and at the same time caused many car companies to reject the cooperation plan with Apple, and the idea of building the whole car was shelved under the team infighting.
Subsequently, Zadesky left and was replaced by Bob Mansfield, who preferred to "develop software and support solutions", in fact, it was also a line to focus on autonomous driving at Apple.
But in 2018, things changed again. Doug Field, a former Tesla senior vice president of engineering who led mass production of the Model 3, joined the Titan program and became the head of the project. Coming from a car company, he naturally believes that building a whole car is the most important thing, which is obviously contrary to Cook's ideas.
By September of last year, Kevin Lynch, who was in charge of software, took over from the departing Doug Field. From the background point of view, Lynch is also biased towards the automatic driving technology route, it is naturally difficult to achieve the requirements of the vehicle-making faction.
In the face of the vacillating route battle, the Titans have missed the best time to build the whole car. So what about Apple's self-driving technology products?
Judging from the information released online, the research and development progress of Apple's autonomous driving has lagged behind competitors such as Waymo, GM Cruise, Zoox, etc., which is embodied in the number of drivers, the number of patents and the collision safety rate. Although Apple began increasing the number of self-driving fleets at the end of last year, while recruiting software-level engineers from other companies, it is not an easy task to close the gap in a short period of time.
From another point of view, most of the executives who left before are closely related to the autonomous driving business, and the Ujkashevic that was dug up this time is just better at the mass production of hardware and the development and manufacturing of complete vehicles. Does this mean that Apple is experiencing a new round of line warfare internally?
Interestingly, Cook's attitude toward autonomous driving also changed last year. In past interviews with the media, Cook has insisted that autonomous driving is a very important core technology (the mother of AI) and has been silent about the topic of car building. In recent years, however, Cook has begun to say in interviews: "Apple is passionate about the integration of hardware, software and services. ”
But it is undeniable that frequent personnel changes have indeed affected Apple's car-making progress. Until Cook clarified the decision on whether to build the self-driving plan or build the whole car, Apple cars were still full of uncertainty.
Rejected supply chains
In addition to the news of the departure of many executives, Apple's car "suffering from foundries" has also frequently made headlines in the news of technology.
In the past year, Apple has successively reported cooperation scandals with South Korean car companies Hyundai and Kia. After the former explicitly announced its withdrawal from the negotiations, Japanese automaker Nissan, the well-known "foundry emperor" Magna and the luxury car brand Porsche have shown interest in cooperating in the production of "Apple Cars", but these rumors quickly dissipated after the hustle and bustle.
Back in the early days of the Titan program, Apple had at least six automakers, including BMW, Daimler, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Hyundai, but these automakers invariably refused to cooperate with Apple.
At present, the foundry model has become one of the mainstream models of automobile manufacturing, and the body structure of new energy vehicles is becoming increasingly simplified, some small car factories with idle production capacity have the ability to oem, and the new forces that do not have car manufacturing in the early days can also quickly achieve mass production with the help of the FOUNDry model, which should be a win-win result. But for Apple, most of the car foundries it is looking for are traditional car companies with a century-old heritage. In the face of a fledgling recruit, these veteran traditional car companies are obviously reluctant to put down their bodies.
So before closing the door again and again, Apple's Titan Project progressed slowly.
Fortunately, Apple's old friend Foxconn once again reached out to help. According to the latest news, Foxconn's parent company Hon Hai Group will be responsible for car production, while the release of Apple cars will still be at the end of 2024 or 2025.
The two companies complement each other. It can be said that without Foxconn, Apple would not have achieved today's achievements, and without Apple, Foxconn could not achieve its current glory.
In the field of car manufacturing, Hon Hai Group has announced that Foxconn will become the "Android of the electric vehicle industry" and launch the electric vehicle platform MIH.
This platform is similar to the "building block" way, the main engine factory can quickly combine the car and reduce production costs, while Foxconn can expand its strength through MIH and enhance the foundry capability.
Of course, Apple will not rely on MIH to create Apple Car, in the final analysis, it still hopes to use Foxconn's strong foundry capabilities.
According to the latest news, Foxconn's OEM Apple car will be priced at as much as $100,000 (about 660,000 yuan), and the car at this price will be benchmarked against BBA and Model S, which is obviously not the technical height that the MIH platform can reach.
epilogue
On the one hand, there is a wobbly route dispute, on the other hand, there are foundries that have repeatedly hit the wall, although Apple has accumulated for many years in the fields of automatic driving, batteries, and smart cockpits, but without hardware as soil, car building is only empty talk after all.
Of course, Apple does not need to worry about not being able to build a car, after all, even Guo Mingxi has set the mass production time of Apple cars at 2025, which is even a year later than Lei's Xiaomi car.