WASHINGTON: According media reports, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, the company known for premium smartphones and home computers to get a premium electric car.
The rumors started February 13 when the Wall Street Journal claimed the project was codenamed ‘Titan’ and that the car currently resembled a minivan.
Legal challenge: News has since emerged that Apple is facing a lawsuit for poaching experts from a company called A123 Systems, which develops batteries used in electric vehicle drive trains.
And the most recent report, courtesy of Bloomberg and published on February 20, claims that Apple is working on a car and is pushing its specially assembled team to get it ready for production by 2020.
Driving into the unknown: None of the stories published thus far offer any convincing reason why the consumer electronics devices leader would want to turn its attention to cars.
As former General Motors CEO Dan Akerson told Bloomberg: “They have no idea what they’re getting into.” He also pointed to the heavy manufacturing and small margins involved in creating cars as reasons for Apple to stay away. In the global automotive industry BMW is a special case, averaging a 20% margin on its cars, while the Volkswagen group’s margins fell to just 2% in 2013.
No time for development: It takes a minimum of five years to develop a car — 10 years if it’s a clean-sheet design — so if Apple is really aiming for a 2020 launch, a ‘mule’ version of the vehicle (a car that doesn’t look like the finished article from the outside but is using the power train and other elements of the finished vehicle) would already be out on test runs.
But as Jalopnik points out, Apple hasn’t been given approval for testing a vehicle with self-driving capabilities on the roads in California — only seven firms are currently running such tests and Apple isn’t one of them.
Track record: But the buzz persists, largely because the reports come from The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, two publications that have managed to penetrate Apple’s highly secretive inner sanctum: they were the very first publications to claim the iPad Mini and the Apple Watch were on their way. And consumers want it to be true. Just as the auto industry started to demonstrate autonomous car technology back in 2013, KPMG’s survey of US drivers found that they would rather own a self driving car built by Apple or by Google than by any existing car maker.
One likely theory is that Apple is working on something to do with connectivity and the convergence of digital services. For example the company has been working for several years on a system for automatically configuring a car. The idea being that by connecting an iPhone to a car’s dashboard, everything from the wing mirrors to the seating position and the radio channel would automatically adjust based on the handset owner’s preferences.
