The "three twists and turns" Apple car project has a new action.
According to foreign media reports, on May 3, Apple hired Desi Ujkashevic, a senior executive of the former Ford Motor Company, to join in charge of Apple's electric vehicle plan, about Desi Ujkashevic, which has been involved in the engineering design of the exterior, interior, chassis and electrical components of many Ford models, with more than 30 years of rich work experience.
On May 4, another media released news that the development of Apple's car is underway, and it is likely to entrust Foxconn to be responsible for the assembly and production of the car.
It is also reported that Apple Cars will not launch a regular model in the mass market, but will launch a model for $100,000 for the high-end market, and the competitor is the Tesla Model S. Apple's biggest selling point should be intelligent technology and automatic driving two major aspects, it is expected that at the end of 2024 or 2025, Apple cars will be officially released.
However, apple did not respond to these rumors, and Foxconn said it would not comment on market rumors.
The prototype of apple cars
More than a decade ago, Jobs, the head of Apple at the time, had plans to enter the automotive industry and met with some auto industry veterans. Unfortunately, with the untimely death of Jobs, Apple's entry into the automotive industry had to be suspended.
The news of Apple's car building once again aroused industry attention in 2014. In 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple had set up a car research and development center, codenamed "Project Titan", focusing on the development of driverless smart cars. At that time, Apple recruited everywhere, attracting experts from Google, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla and other companies to form a 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.
It wasn't until 2017 that Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly acknowledged the plan and said the company would focus on self-driving systems. This also confirms the industry's previous rumors.
As the world's largest company in market capitalization, Apple's car-making project has always attracted widespread attention from the industry and the public, but this project is also "three twists and turns".
Personnel changes lead to speculation?
Just before Apple hired former Ford executive Desi Ujkashevic, Apple's car project experienced several changes in its executive team. In August 2018, Doug Field, the former vice president of Mac hardware engineering at Apple, was rehired back to Apple after five years at Tesla, and it was reported that Field would be in charge of Apple's Titan project. Field by this time had become a senior vice president of engineering at Tesla and a chief automotive engineer for the Model 3.
After Field, Tesla had two more vice presidents to switch to Apple. In March 2019, Michael Schwekutsch, vice president of Tesla's electric drive systems, joined Apple. In July of the same year, Steve MacManus, vice president of research and development for Tesla's interior and exterior, joined Apple.
Also in 2019, Apple acquired self-driving startup Drive.ai to strengthen its own autonomous driving research and development capabilities.
According to incomplete statistics, as of 2020, Apple's Special Projects Group (mainly responsible for innovation projects) has a total of more than 1,200 people, of which 170 are from Ford Motor Company, more than 300 are from Tesla, and more than 110 are from automotive-related private research institutions.
As of 2020, Apple's Special Projects Group (mainly responsible for innovation projects) has a total of more than 1,200 people, of which 170 are from Ford Motor Company, more than 300 are from Tesla, and more than 110 are from private research institutions related to automobiles. By 2021, Apple will again lose two big generals in a row: Michael Schwekuch, the lead engineer of the self-driving car project, and Field, who has just returned to his old club for less than a year. Just in January 2022, Joe Bass, a project manager for autonomous driving systems engineering who had worked at Apple for seven years, also announced his departure.
The latest news about Apple's car is temporarily stuck on March 15, 2022. Tianfeng International analyst Guo Mingpei said on Twitter that the Apple Car team of Apple, which has been exposed for a long time, has been disbanded for a period of time. To meet the goal of achieving mass production by 2025, the team must restructure within the next 6 months.
Personnel turmoil has led to instability in the project, fueling suspicion about Apple's car-making sport.
Become a supplier or build a car?
On the one hand, Apple's search for cooperation with car companies has failed one after another. In 2018, the New York Times reported that after Apple's proposed cooperation with BMW and Mercedes-Benz failed, and then potential cooperation plans with other car companies such as Nissan, BYD, and McLaren also failed.
On the other hand, news of Apple's car manufacturing keeps coming out. As early as December 2020, Taiwan's "Economic Daily" reported that Apple put forward stocking requirements to Taiwan auto parts manufacturers such as Heda, Trade Union, Heqin, Andian, etc. Apple is expected to release Apple cars in September 2021. According to Reuters, Apple plans to produce a pure electric passenger car in 2024. DigiTimes predicts that Apple cars will be unveiled between 2024 and 2025.
Coupled with the recent news that Apple is likely to hand over to Foxconn for auto parts assembly and production, it seems to indicate the possibility of Apple's car manufacturing.
Will Apple's car become the next "Apple phone"?
Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen Group, has admitted that Apple will become a more fearsome opponent than Toyota after building a car. Li Bin, the founder of Weilai Automobile, also said that The ultimate opponent of Weilai is Apple.
As the world's largest market capitalization, Apple is bound to trigger a large-scale change once it is involved in the whirlpool of electric vehicles.
Compared with the manufacture of complete vehicles, Apple's progress in the field of autonomous driving seems to be smoother. In 2017, Apple CEO Timothy D. Cook spoke publicly about Apple's work on self-driving software. "We're focused on autonomous driving systems, which are core technologies that we think are very important, and we see it as the mother of all AI projects," Cook said.
Apple already owns CarPlay in the automotive space, after analysts estimated that CarPlay could add $2 billion to Apple's annual service sales if it bundling. CarPlay has limited features, mainly for entertainment, navigation, but its success may create an inherent demand for Apple cars in the future.
In addition, there is a view that Apple may develop an operating system for the whole vehicle, driven by its own chips. Tianfeng Securities analyst Guo Mingji believes that apple car will become Apple's next star product.
But can Apple, which has been late for so many years, really stand out in the field of new energy vehicles, which is fiercely competitive today?
In terms of the domestic market alone, Xiaopeng, Ideal and Weilai are opening up a gap with the car companies behind them, and their annual sales in 2021 will exceed 90,000 vehicles; Nezha, Weima and Zero Run are also catching up. As Daniel Zhang, CEO of Nezha Automobile, said in an interview with the media: "I think that before the annual sales of three or five hundred thousand vehicles, we should not say that we are the head, everyone is working hard to survive." Although Apple has the advantages of financial resources, talents, and technology, the market left for Apple is gradually shrinking.
Tesla, which nearly sold to Apple that year, sold nearly a million electric cars in 2021. From the 0th to the 1 millionth, Tesla took 12 years. From "Tesla is the apple of the car industry" to "Apple is the apple of the car world", how long does Apple have to go?