Source | Shentucar original
Author | Zhou Jifeng
Edit | dawn
According to Bloomberg, Desi Ujkashevic, a female executive who has worked at Ford for 31 years, recently joined the Apple car project.
The female executive has been responsible for the engineering of the interiors, exteriors, chassis and electrical components of many Ford models.
Previously, Apple's car-making project was once in crisis.
On March 15, the famous Apple analyst Mingji Guo revealed on his personal Twitter that Apple's staff team in charge of apple car projects has been "disbanded for some time."
According to Kuo's calculations, if Apple wants to complete the goal of mass production of the car by 2025, it must reorganize its team in the next three to six months.
Apple's interest in building cars began in the Jobs era, but the real implementation has to be counted from 2014.
In 2014, there were media reports that Apple quietly organized a team of hundreds of people to secretly carry out a car-making project, and named it "Project Titan".
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. At its peak, McKinsey gave a staggering valuation prediction: By 2030, the Apple Titan project could be worth about $6.7 trillion. You know, as of now, Apple's market value is only $2.84 trillion.
But for 8 years, the Titans struggled with the mire of games, internal conflicts, and layoffs, and have not been able to climb out.
Now, a few months after the news of the dissolution of Apple's car-making team, Apple's car-making project has finally ushered in new personnel changes. Can the new female executives save Apple's car project?
Apple builds cars, no goals
Apple has never officially informed the public of its car-building plans, and no one knows where the Titans plan has progressed. There are various rumors related to the "Apple Car", it is said that apple-made cars may not have a steering wheel, no foot pedals, and the wheels are spherical...
People can only piece together Apple's car-making process through the words of some whistleblowers or some media exclusives.
Combing through Apple's car history, you will find that Apple itself may not be sure what it wants to do.
Titans plan to jump back and forth between "whether to build a car or not", "whether to build a car yourself", "whether to build a semi-automatic car or a fully automatic car".
Strategic hesitation and uncertainty have created two huge and fatal problems for the "Apple Car":
First, the team's internal game and disagreement are serious. In 8 years, the Titan program has replaced several project leaders, a number of core executives have left, and a large number of talents have been lost.
Second, due to the lack of a clear goal, Apple has suspended and pushed down the former car-making plan several times, and repeated internal friction, which has led to Apple's extremely slow progress in car-making for many years.
In the earliest days, the leader of Apple's car-making program was Vice President Steve Zadesky.
Steve Zadski wants to take the limited autonomous driving route, and team members including Apple's chief designer Jonathan Ive believe that the fully autonomous driving route should be taken. There is a high degree of disagreement among the top brass. In 2016, Steve Zaderski announced plans to withdraw from the project.
This is the first round of personnel turmoil in Apple's car project.
There are reports that hundreds of hardware and software engineers were forced to leave the country during the turmoil.
Subsequently, Apple veteran Bob Mansfield took over the project as the second generation of the Titans' project.
Source / unsplash
During the time of Steve Zadwski, Apple was committed to building complete vehicles. According to media reports, Apple spent a long time researching how to reduce noise, electric doors, and integrate augmented reality, and even considered reinventing the wheel.
But when Bob took the lead, it all fell back. According to Bob's imagination, Apple should focus on developing driverless systems, rather than building its own cars. So, in May 2018, the New York Times reported that Apple plans to work with Volkswagen to integrate Apple's self-driving technology into Volkswagen's T6 van.
But internal divisions remain, with Doug Field, an Apple veteran who worked at Tesla, returning to take charge of the Titans in 2018. The Titans plan to change the person in charge again.
The team that calmed down was thinking about what Apple should do in the automotive field. Eventually they came to the conclusion that yes, the whole car should be built. In 2020, Reuters reported that Apple once again plans to develop a car in-house, with a possible release in 2024.
But by September 2021, Doug Field, who had turned the tide, also left Apple and jumped ship to Ford. To make matters worse, Doug left with three executives in key positions.
Watch OS project executive Kevin Lynch was appointed interim head.
In the past few years, Apple's car has 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. In January, Mark Gurman, a well-known bloomberg journalist, revealed that Joe Bass, head of software engineering project management for Apple's automotive team, had left Apple to join Meta (formerly Facebook), a company that transformed the metacosm. Previously, he had been working on the Apple car project for 7 years, and he was a veteran. With the departure of Joe Bass, Apple's auto management team a year ago left almost entirely.
Underestimated the difficulty of building a car
In addition to not having a goal and not being able to find a suitable car leader, Apple also made a mistake - underestimating the difficulty of building a car.
In a business that requires huge capital investment, such as car manufacturing, Apple actually has many advantages, such as strong financial resources, abundant cash flow, and affordable money. The core of the era of smart cars is software, systems, platforms and ecology, which are Apple's strengths.
According to many people's vision, the "Apple Car" can revolutionize the car, just like the iPhone disrupted the mobile phone industry in 2007.
This confidence has somewhat continued to Apple's management, which has reported that Apple's management set a goal in the early days of the Titan plan - to build electric vehicles in 2019.
In 2014, Apple had just set up a car-making project. In other words, the team will build an electric car within 5 years.
We also know the story behind, not to mention 2019, in 2022, "Apple Car" can not even see the shadow.
In fact, in the face of a brand new field of cars, Apple has a lot of inadequacies.
Cross-border car-making roads are fraught with risks, long cycles, and low fault tolerance rates. Apple has never built a car, and the lack of experience has also made Apple's car-making road extremely difficult.
Source / unsplash
Doug Field, the third person in charge of the Titan project, once said this to the media, which seems to prove the difficulty of Apple's car:"It's a cool thing to start a brand new car company or start a brand new car project from scratch." However, most of these new projects lack sustained resources and stamina. ”
From the perspective of business model, 3C products such as Apple mobile phones have a high profit margin, and car manufacturing is a typical low-profit industry. These are inconsistent with Apple's traditional business model, costs and profits.
Unlike the mobile phone industry, the automotive industry relies on long-term accumulation in manufacturing, technology, talent, channels, supply chains, etc. In these respects, Apple is a strange layman.
In particular, the complexity of the car is much higher than that of the mobile phone, and the number of parts needed to produce an electric car is about 10,000. Faced with such a complex supply chain, Apple cannot be as handy as it is in the mobile phone industry.
A person familiar with the matter has pointed out to the media. In the smartphone space, Apple has a wide range of influences and often gets 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 their products to tech companies like Apple, which may initially have small shipments.
On top of that, so far, Apple has no friends on the road to car building.
Sam Abuelsamid, chief electric vehicle analyst at Guidehouse Insights, has pointed out that if Apple does launch its own car, it needs a partner. "Because building cars and managing supply chains is a lot more complicated than making phones or computers, as Tesla has painfully learned over the past decade."
In order to find friends, Apple has made many efforts. In February 2021, there were rumors that Apple would partner with Hyundai Kia to produce a car with the Apple brand at its plant in Kia Georgia, but the plan was aborted. According to the Nikkei News, Apple has negotiated with at least 6 car manufacturers, including Kia and Nissan, in order to build a car, 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.
Working with Porsche?
So the next question is, will people still have a chance to meet the "Apple Car"?
Judging from the current news, Apple is ready to continue to "build cars". But the fog still hangs over the Titan program, and no one knows exactly what form the "Apple Car" will eventually appear, and who Apple will ultimately choose to work with.
The latest news is that Apple is considering partnering with Porsche.
The whistleblower of the news was Porsche CEO Oliver Blume. He revealed at the company's annual results video conference that Porsche has discussed "exciting joint projects" with Apple.
"We've already partnered on CarPlay,"We're already working on CarPlay, and we're going to expand a bit more in the future." Oliver Blume said, "It's too early to make any conclusive conclusions about future projects. ”
Porsche with Apple? In the eyes of many people, this is an "unimagined path".
From a realistic point of view, though, this is not a crazy collaboration.
The development momentum of global electric vehicles is strong, and Porsche is one of the many luxury brands, and few have successful transformations. In China, Porsche has released 16 new energy vehicles (including pure electric and plug-in models).
Recently, the company is preparing to separate from the parent company Volkswagen Group and IPO separately. And Porsche has begun to build its own electrical and electronic architecture, that is, PPE architecture.
However, Guo Mingxi pointed out on Twitter afterwards that if Porsche wants to cooperate with Apple, then it will take at least 2-3 years to participate in Apple's large-scale mass production. Because at present, there is still a lot of uncertainty about Apple's car.
On the other hand, the famous whistleblower Licks ApplePro said that Apple may entrust Foxconn to build Apple cars. He claimed that the Apple Car will still be released at the end of 2024 or 2025, but Apple will not launch a mass-market electric car, but will target the high-end market of more than $100,000 (equivalent to about 660,000 yuan) to benchmark Tesla's Model S.
Of course, there's a good chance apple will never find the right partner.
Techrader reports that Apple may be prepared to take on the entire development process alone — similar to the approach Tesla once took.
The automotive industry is changing from the surging turbo era to the quiet pure electricity era, according to the 2021 global new energy brand sales data released by the CleanTechnica website, the cumulative sales of new energy models in the world in 2021 will be nearly 6.5 million, 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 such a big change, Apple is indeed late. This means that Apple is ceding a large amount of the market to potential competitors.
Moreover, Apple has to face more and more opponents, in addition to new forces such as Tesla and Wei Xiaoli. Large numbers 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 relatively good news is that apple is currently working on fully autonomous vehicles without steering wheels and drivers, and there has been some progress.
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.
On fully autonomous vehicles, many companies, including Tesla, are also in a difficult period of research and development and have not yet reached the end. Apple is not far behind and still has the opportunity to catch up.
And policy has dawned. In March, the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released the final version of the Driverless Car Passenger Protection Regulations, which clarified that fully autonomous vehicles no longer need to be equipped with manual controls such as traditional steering wheels, brakes, or accelerator pedals to meet occupant safety protection standards in collisions.
But for now, Apple needs to accelerate its action and regroup its team. As Bloomberg's well-known reporter Gurman said bluntly, 2022 is definitely a key year for the success or failure of Apple's car project. If Apple also intends to launch fully autonomous vehicles in 2025, they need to act as soon as possible to reduce mistakes.
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