Apple is giving up the struggle! Apple Car is going to jump to 2028!
PUBLISHED
2024-01-23
In 2014, Apple’s “Titan Project” was launched, authorized by CEO Tim Cook, recruited more than 1,000 employees, and met with Austrian car company Magna Steyr in the hope of reaching a partnership.
Ten years later, Apple’s “Titan Program”, seems to have given up looking for “a big hit” opportunity, just want to be able to successfully implement the product, and that’s it.
According to Bloomberg, in order to successfully bring the Apple Car to market, Apple has turned to a simpler, less ambitious design. In other words: build the car first, disrupt the industry later.
Apple’s Compromise
Apple has been struggling for a full decade since 2014, and the Vision Pro, which was launched a year after the car, is now in production and on sale.
In retrospect, the Apple Car has been so ‘ill-fated’ mostly because it carries Apple’s fervent desire to make big profits on top of the iPhone.
Previously, the Titan Project probably revealed an Apple Car like this one:
It costs more than $120,000, is shaped like a big smooth mouse, has no steering wheel or gas/brake pedals, is equipped with an iPad in the center console, has a C1 chip modified from the A12 bionic processor, as well as “revolutionary” sensors, and, more importantly, is capable of L5-level autonomous driving.
What the Apple Car was rumored to look like
And then in 2022, after eight years of hard work, Apple decided to take a step backward and step forward, to downgrade from L5 to L3, allowing cars to drive autonomously on the highway. Even so, it was an elusive goal.
Now, Apple has decided to return to reality by abandoning the development of L3 autonomous driving and switching to the current mainstream L2+ assisted driving, on par with Tesla’s current level.
Apple’s ambition for autonomous driving has long been no secret.
In February 2015, a mysterious car was found driving on the streets of Northern California with multiple sensors on the roof. Some people guessed that Apple attempted to do something like “Google Street View”, while others said it had something to do with autonomous driving.
Apple later came out and stated that it was a ‘mapping project’.
A few days after the mystery car appeared, an unidentified Apple employee, via email, broke the news to Business Insider, suggesting that Apple was working on a project to ‘compete with Tesla’ and that several Tesla employees would be jumping ship to come.
The news of Apple’s massive recruitment of automotive technologists and design experts could not be hidden any longer. However, at this point, people still thought that Apple was developing a software platform based on CarPlay, and didn’t think of anything else until the ‘Titan Project’ was revealed.
Technology should ultimately serve the goal, in the end, whether to do automatic driving, or assisted driving, Apple’s internal disagreement has existed since then. In 2016, a wave of executives changed, and the “Titan program” came to a standstill.
Before the second wave of big layoffs in 2019, Apple Car rumors were all related to making software and not hardware. After the departure of the ‘Project Titan’ team and the rest of the 200-plus employees at the beginning of the year, Apple acquired Drive.ai, a startup designing a self-driving shuttle service, in June.
In early 2020, Apple had several rounds of talks with electric car company Canoo, which developed a scalable, modular electric car platform that focused on building commercial electric minivans, and later merged with Hennessy, from an investment to an acquisition.
Canoo founder Ulrich Kranz, former BMW executive joins apple
‘Jumping the gun’ and still going strong
At first, Apple expected the release of its first car to be in 2019, and reports in late 2021 suggested that Apple could officially announce the car-making project in 2022 and launch it in 2025. But by 2022, the wait was for news of another delay to 2026.
At the time, the bad news was accompanied by good news – the Apple Car was expected to cost less than USD 100,000. On the one hand, people who can afford to buy an Apple Car won’t particularly care about the $20,000 or so difference in price. And, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average price of buying an electric car in 2022 will be $48,000, less than half of $100,000.
The following year, John Giannandrea, head of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, took over Project Titan, and after Doug Field, an executive from Tesla, left in September 2021, Kevin Lynch, who was in charge of the Apple Watch, joined in.
Apple also hired Porsche executive Manfred Harrer, one of the Volkswagen Group’s best engineers. Apple also recruited former BMW executive Ulrich Kranz, the founder of Canoo, who developed the i3 and i8 for BMW, as well as two engineers from Mercedes-Benz, both of whom specialize in vehicle powertrains.
However, gossip has it that Apple’s automotive team has been “disbanded for some time” and will be reorganized in the next three to six months, making the 2025 production goals difficult to achieve.
On the other hand, for a new car that won’t be released for a long time, a price cut doesn’t mean a ‘promotion’, it more likely means that some ‘core’ features will be cut or axed.
And at $100,000, side-by-side comparisons were about the same as Tesla’s standard Model S and the Mercedes-Benz EQS at the time. At the same time, the pressure was on to go head-to-head with the top brands in EVs and fuel cars down the road. So when the ‘good’ and bad news first broke, Apple shares fell 2% in response. For the entire year 2022, Apple’s stock is down 19%. Even so, it still outperformed most stocks in the Nasdaq Composite Index. Now, in the year 2024 we’re living in, the starting price of the Tesla Model S has dropped to $74,990, and even the Model S Plaid, with its three motors and 1,200 horsepower, is ‘only’ $89,990, making the $100,000 Apple Car, ever tougher. From this perspective, Apple’s lowering of expectations may also have something to do with the cost of a single car.
At the same time, Apple made a compromise for self-driving, the release of the Apple Car will be postponed again to 2028. That is, 14 years after the start of the ‘Titan Project’.
Apple believes that 2028 will be a make-or-break moment, and that if the Apple Car doesn’t launch on time, the company’s management will “seriously reassess whether the program should continue. Apple just can’t afford to run out of time.
Apple is investing more and more in R&D for the ‘next big thing’
Over the years, the “Titan project” has become one of Apple’s largest expenditure projects, every year to invests billions of dollars for the payment of employee salaries, rely on Amazon Web Services hosted cloud components of the self-driving system, as well as a series of research and development needs such as test vehicles, roads.
All along, Apple has revealed a very clear idea of building cars:
Firmly control the midstream chain, battery Package self-research, system chip self-research. The downstream can completely rely on Apple’s own strong marketing capabilities and various store channels for “experience plus sales”.
The upstream of the new energy vehicle industry chain is mainly raw materials, which Apple can’t put much effort into. In this link, lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, rare earths are the main minerals, and lithium carbonate used in batteries is the key raw material. At the same time, to range, automobile lightweight requirements are getting higher and higher, and magnesium aluminum alloy demand is also increasing.
Apple’s original car chassis was based on the platform of Hyundai’s E-GMP electric car
And in the midstream of the industry chain, the first is battery manufacturing. Battery is the largest material cost in new energy vehicles, and Apple is obviously looking for more mature battery suppliers to cooperate and throw the core technology to the suppliers. But in addition, Package technology and battery management system (BMS), Apple will be involved.
Package is the process of assembling lithium battery cells into a group, which can be a single battery or a series-parallel battery module, and Apple uses a single battery.
Each process of the Package is very complicated, including customized development technology of battery management system, thermal management technology, current control and testing technology, module assembly design technology, and so on.
BMS includes four links: upstream materials, BMS modules, BMS products, and downstream applications. Previously, BMS was provided by professional power battery enterprises, and traditional car manufacturers are less involved in this area. However, with the acceleration of electrification, Tesla has taken BMS as its core technology, and other car companies have also followed suit and started BMS through mergers and acquisitions, strategic cooperation, etc. Apple should be unwilling to “fall behind”.
In fact, Apple’s idea of building a car is more similar to that of building a cell phone, relying on the chip and interaction design to create a quality experience, and leaving everything else to the OEM.
Currently, Apple is meeting with potential partners in Europe to discuss their next step.
There’s no room for an Apple Car in the U.S.
The development of the Apple Car seems to have gone silent for now, and if Apple doesn’t adopt an acquisition strategy to enter the automotive market, I doubt there’s any way for this product to go into mass production in the next few years.
The last time we saw anything from Apple was in March 2023, when it upgraded its self-driving capabilities and expanded its testing. The last time we saw it again was in 2022.
The news comes on the heels of a big announcement that the Apple Car team “has been disbanded for some time and will be reorganized in the next three to six months. Joining the Apple Car team is longtime Ford engineer Desi Ujkashevic, who worked on the Ford Renegade, Explorer, Fiesta, and Focus, and has extensive experience building electric vehicles.
Although electric vehicles are widely recognized as the future dominant force in the automotive industry, recent weak demand and changing market conditions have forced many car companies to rethink their strategic direction.
‘Leader’ Tesla has put on hold the construction of its Mexican factory, and GM and Honda have followed suit by announcing the termination of their entry-level EV partnership program. GM also abandoned its goal of producing 400,000 EVs in North America by mid-2024 and slashed billions of dollars from its budget.
GM CEO Mary Barra previously said that GM “still has a plan” but that the plan will be flexible and adjusted as circumstances dictate.
On the other side, Ford Motor also admitted that its Model E division, which focuses on electric vehicles and the future of mobility, lost as much as $1.3 billion in the third quarter of 2023, and attributed this significant loss to continued investments in next-generation electric vehicles, as well as the complexity of market dynamics, before postponing its $12 billion electric vehicle investment program.
Even industry giants have had to take a half-step back in such a cold snap.
At the end of 2023, some 4,000 U.S. auto dealers sent a joint letter to the U.S. government asking for a slowdown in the rollout of electric vehicles. The joint letter mentioned that electric cars would be desirable for many people and that their appeal would grow. But the reality is that “regulations have prompted an influx of electric cars into stores, but market demand has not kept up, and pure electric cars have been piling up in North American dealerships.”
Lack of subsidies for premium models, increased price sensitivity among consumers, as well as higher maintenance costs than for fuel vehicles, and inadequate charging infrastructure, were cited as the main reasons for the slowdown in electric vehicle growth in the United States, according to Forbes magazine.
According to the data, electric vehicle sales reached 317,168 units in the fourth quarter in the U.S., with the market share rising to 8.1%, a new sales record, but the growth rate has slowed down.
In addition, Reuters 24 reported that Tesla plans to start production of a new compact electric crossover code-named “Redwood” in mid-2025, the legendary “$25,000 Tesla”.
In this case, the space left for Apple will become smaller and smaller.
