Today we're going to speculate the news that Apple has been playing around with the idea of making their own car. They have definitely been working on and off with the apple car idea for over a decade. Steve Jobs was serious enough about the concept that he had to come down to the decision to either pursue the iPhone or the iCar. He chose to make the phone because he was a very smart man and it worked pretty much well for Apple. The Apple Auto Project never really went away, however, in 2015 we started seeing some new information.
A Dodge caravan owned by Apple, with some strange camera stuff on top was seen driving through Northern California. And that sparked speculation about the development of self-driving vehicle technologies soon after an anonymous source told us that Apple was working on a project that would give Tesla a run for its money.
The source said Tesla employees would jump ship to work on a project at Apple that was too exciting to do. Since then, Tesla's research and development has gone through the roof and they're one of the most valuable companies in the world, while all the information we get about Apple's project still comes from nameless people.
Over the last five years, at Apple hundreds of people hired and laid off, and design experts to come work on something called project titan which may or may not have been intended to be some kind of minivan like electric vehicle. As far as anyone can tell, nothing really fast had been done as of December 2020. Apparently this team explored a ton of different ideas around vehicle design and autonomous driving but had a lot of trouble agreeing on anything leading to internal strife changes in leadership.
Now we have new reports that Apple is working on its own consumer EV that will come with revolutionary battery design and autonomous driving technology. And it's coming soon in 2024, or maybe even 2022 from some sources; and Tesla bears on the stock market are hailing this as one formidable threat to Tesla's dominance in the EV market.
Is this the nail in Tesla's coffin that they have been waiting for and betting on all along, or is this just a repeat of that 2015 hype that went nowhere?
Let's take a look at this battery development. The sources claim that Apple plans to use a unique single-cell design that bulks up the individual cells in the battery and frees up space inside the battery pack by eliminating pouches and modules that hold battery materials. One of these people said apple's design means that more active material can be packed inside the battery giving the car a potentially longer range.
Apple is also exploring a chemistry for the battery called LFP, or Lithium-Iron-Phosphate, which is inherently less likely to overheat and therefore safer than other types of lithium-ion batteries.
Lithium iron phosphate is nothing new. Tesla talked about this chemistry months ago, and they are even using it on their Chinese Model 3 vehicle. Even Toyota's new solid-state battery announcement is more feasible than anything an anonymous Apple source here suggests. Perhaps Apple's battery design with the mono-cell is more advanced than Tesla's 4680 cell, but will production be scalable enough for Apple to be able to do it like Tesla does?
Then there is autonomous vehicle software. We have to assume Apple can somehow get around the fact that they are years behind Tesla when it comes to machine learning for self-driving cars. If anyone could fill that void in a crazy revolutionary way, surely it could be Apple doing this, but let's not overlook the fact that Tesla has millions of miles of data collection feeding their full self-driving. This is the biggest problem with the Apple car idea if they seriously plan to go their own way and release their own car with their own battery and their own autonomous software.
If Apple delivers a car that is anything less than perfect and beautiful and essentially mind-blowing, it could be seen as a complete failure on their part, and that's a tough one. If anyone has the money to pull it off, it would be Apple but could it possibly even be worth the investment? The more practical way would likely be to work with an existing automaker to build the physical structure.
Finally, let's say Apple builds and releases its own electric car with batteries, drive train, and self-driving software that either meets or exceeds Tesla, does that make them legitimate competition for Tesla as an automaker? probably not any time soon.
Of course, it would be amazing if Apple got into the electric car game. The more the merrier around here. This is supposed to be about saving the world, not a pissing competition. Tesla never had the goal of dominating the market. The goal instead must be set on market innovations that accelerate the adoption of sustainable technologies.
