The "Apple Car" plan that the senior executive departure team disbanded restarted, is there a future for the continuation?

From the end of 2020, the rumors of Apple to build a car have continued, and even the news that it will be launched, but there is news in the industry that the Apple car project team has been disbanded. If you want to mass-produce apple cars in 2025, you need to reorganize the team in 3 to 6 months. What will Apple's car bring? Following the trend or subverting? 》

Previously, after the exposure of car-making news, Apple's performance was not positive, the high-level attitude was wavering, and the progress of car-making was only intermittently exposed by the media. In the view of Innovationcases, Apple cars are far from landing.

The Titan plan with a bumpy fate

Apple's interest in building cars began in the Jobs era, and jobs discussed the idea of iCar when he met with Wendern, then CEO of Volkswagen Group, in 2007. But the real implementation was in 2014, when some media reported that Apple organized a team of hundreds of people to secretly carry out a car-making project, named "Project Titan", which is mainly committed to the research and development of driverless smart cars.

And Apple also has the basis for entering the field of car networking, releasing the "iOSin the car" (later renamed CarPlay) in-vehicle system. Ferrari, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz became its first partners.

The "Apple Car" is seen as Apple's "next star product" and is discussed every once in a while. All the car giants see Apple as their biggest competitor.

But for 8 years, the Titans program stagnated, and strategic hesitation and uncertainty brought two huge and fatal problems to the "Apple Car":

First, the team's internal game and disagreement are serious. The Titan program has replaced several project leaders, left several key executives, and lost a lot of talent.

Second, due to the lack of a clear goal, repeated internal friction, which has led to Apple's extremely slow progress in car manufacturing for many years.

After Watch OS project executive Kevin Lynch became the interim head of the Titan program, Apple set two directions internally, one is to develop a car with limited self-driving capabilities, and the other is to develop a model with fully autonomous driving capabilities and without human intervention. Kevin Lynch chose the second option, but still failed to save the Titans. With the departure of Joe Bass, head of software engineering project management for Apple's automotive team, Apple's automotive management team left almost all of its year.

Behind apple's car failure

After 8 years of burning countless money, executives leaving, team restructuring, Apple car construction seems to be left with only the value of business case studies.

In addition to not having a goal, Apple's most serious mistake was underestimating the difficulty of building a car. In the business of building cars, which requires huge capital investment, Apple actually has many advantages, such as strong financial resources, abundant cash flow, and affordability. At the heart of the smart era are software, systems, platforms, and ecosystems, all of which are Apple's strengths.

According to many people's imagination, "Apple Car" is entirely capable of changing the automotive industry, just as the iPhone has previously subverted the mobile phone industry.

In fact, in the face of a brand new field of cars, Apple has many limitations.

First of all, the risk of building a car is more than that of a mobile phone, and the cycle is long and the fault tolerance is low, but Apple has never built a car, and the lack of experience makes it extremely difficult for Apple to build a car.

In terms of business model, 3C products such as Apple mobile phones have high profit margins, and car manufacturing is a typical low-profit industry. None of this is in line with Apple's traditional business model. Unlike the mobile phone industry, the automotive industry relies on the long-term accumulation of manufacturing, technology, talent, channels and supply chains. In these respects, Apple is a layman.

In particular, the complexity of the car is much higher than that of the mobile phone, and the number of parts required to produce an electric vehicle is about 10,000. Faced with such a complex supply chain, Apple is unlikely to be as handy as it is in the mobile phone industry. Previously, Tesla encountered a bottleneck in the mass production of the Model 3, and the company was only one month away from bankruptcy. Why did Toyota lose to Tesla in the field of electric vehicles? 》

Secondly, Apple lacks ecological accumulation in the field of car manufacturing.

In the smartphone space, Apple has a wide range of influences, and often can get exclusive cooperation rights from suppliers. But in the case of cars, the large upfront investment required for auto parts means that many suppliers are reluctant to deliver to tech companies like Apple, which can have small initial shipments.

In terms of the model of cooperation with traditional cars, according to the Nikkei Shimbun, Apple has negotiated with at least 6 car manufacturers such as Kia and Nissan in order to build cars, but these car companies without exception cannot accept the cooperation model with Apple. Apple's strength has made car companies worry that they will become foundries.

Finally, in recent years, Apple has been weak in terms of innovation ability, as the world's most influential technology company, the exploration of new industries is getting smaller and smaller, and it has been in a conservative state.

The form of smart straight phones was pioneered by Apple, but since then, Apple's exclusive technological innovation has been very small. And in addition, Apple's mobile phone seems to have to change a little appearance and function every year, and then start to innovate, and then win with new products.

After Cook succeeded Jobs, he has shifted from product experience beyond consumer perception to supply chain, distribution, finance and marketing.

At present, there is a certain threshold for intelligent automobile manufacturing, and the accumulation of technology, talent reserves, various manufacturing cooperation systems, and huge upstream and downstream supply chains in the industry need long-term accumulation.

The "Apple Car" of the future

The automotive industry is developing rapidly, with cumulative sales of new energy models worldwide reaching nearly 6.5 million units in 2021, an increase of 108% year-on-year. Today, the annual sales of each "Wei Xiaoli" have approached 100,000 vehicles, and Tesla is about to exceed one million annual sales. In this context, if Apple abandons the "Apple Car", it means giving up a large amount of the market to potential competitors. "Invest $10 billion in 10 years!" Lei Jun's last business, Xiaomi officially announced the car, how many chances of winning? 》

Apple has to face more and more opponents, in addition to Tesla, a strong opponent, in China, Wei Xiaoli and other new forces can not be ignored, not to mention that there are a large number of traditional car companies that are transforming, such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz, as well as the Internet and technology companies are also entering the market for new energy vehicles. "The polarization of the new factions of domestic car-making forces, what will be the final situation?" 》

Luo Rentong, an expert in the application of digital economy, believes that the future of smart cars will become mobile terminals that change human society like the smart phones of the year, and the industrial structure will also form a new industrial structure, so Apple, as a representative of the company of scientific and technological innovation, will inevitably be deeply involved in the automobile industry, but from a business point of view, Apple may choose more from other forms of finance, rather than independently manufacturing Apple cars, and Apple cannot get rid of the law of production and manufacturing.

The relatively good news is that Apple has also invested in the research and development of new technologies, bloomberg reported that most of the core work of Apple's self-developed self-driving chips has been completed. At the same time, Apple's car's underlying autonomous driving system, processor chips and new sensors have also made significant progress. Apple's CarPlay and Appstore provide a shortcut for apple ecosystems to enter the automotive industry.

Apple's official data shows that more than 80% of new cars sold worldwide in 2020 support CarPlay, and at least 600 support CarPlay. Apple is trying to build its own ecosystem of in-car experiences around driving companies and is beginning to use its Appstore platform to encourage software developers to optimize automotive applications.

In addition, Apple is also working fully autonomous vehicles without steering wheels and drivers, and has made some progress. But in any case, it is still relatively difficult to complete mass production within 3-5 years.