At a time when China's "Wei Xiaoli" continues to make progress and latecomers such as Xiaomi and Huawei are ambitious, Apple, which has adhered to the car dream for more than ten years, has finally ushered in a "real hammer" after many rumors that it will give up making cars.
On February 28, Bloomberg reported that Apple had abandoned its plans to build a car and had some of its employees involved in the project move to a more popular field of the moment: generative AI. It was revealed that Apple's chief operating officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, vice president in charge of the car manufacturing project, jointly made the decision. The current Apple team of more than 2,000 employees, including hundreds of hardware engineers and car designers, will be relocated to the AI team and other Apple projects, and may also be partially laid off.
Apple's dream of building a car for ten years has actually had signs of dying, and it is not surprising that it ended in the end.
And what kind of inspiration and lessons will Apple's abandonment of car manufacturing bring to China's Xiaomi, Huawei, and others?
After ten years of tossing, the Apple car was finally reduced to a piece of chicken feathers.
Since Apple's car plan surfaced in 2014, the progress of Apple's car plan has been in the global spotlight every time in the past few years. In fact, Apple's car-building plan has been repeated several times from the beginning, and it can be regarded as the most volatile project within Apple.
Apple's self-driving car business took shape in 2014 and is codenamed "Titan" internally. At the beginning of the "Titan Project", the project leader Steve Zadesky and then Apple's design director Jonathan Ivey had a major technical disagreement - Zadesky wanted Apple to develop a car with semi-autonomous driving capabilities, while Ivey believed that Apple should focus on software and completely change the form of the car's product to create a fully autonomous car without a steering wheel.
The two giants clashed and stalled Apple's Titan program, which did not turn around until the end of 2015 when Zadesky left the company. In 2016, retired Apple executive Bob Mans Field made a comeback and restarted Titan. After the change of leadership, Titan also suspended the development of the whole vehicle and turned to fully autonomous driving software.
At that time, Apple was rumored to have given up directly participating in car building. In a letter sent by Apple to the U.S. Department of Transportation that year, Apple made it clear that it would not build cars like Tesla, but would focus on the research and development of self-driving software technology - this change, just like in the matter of building cars, from Xiaomi's route to Huawei.
Just as Huawei's "don't make cars" came out of the wavering news, Apple's "don't make cars" also changed in 2018. Former Apple's vice president of Mac hardware engineering, Doug Field, was rehired back to Apple after five years at Tesla. Field, who "got the truth" from Tesla, once again made car building a top priority for Apple's Titan team. In 2019, Apple acquired Drive., a troubled self-driving startupai。On the same day that the acquisition was confirmed, the USPTO also published Apple's patents for remotely controlling and driving cars.
Three years ago, in February 2021, the news that Apple would invest 4 trillion won (about 3.6 billion U.S. dollars) in Kia Motors for the construction of production facilities and car development once made the industry think that Apple was about to cooperate with Hyundai Kia to build cars, and even gave a specific timetable for "Apple-brand electric vehicles will be on the road in 2024" at that time.
Personnel changes then caused another turmoil in Apple's car-building plans. In 2021, with the departure of Field and several key engineers, Apple's car-building project seems to have stalled again. Subsequently, Kevin Lynch, who was in charge of the Apple Watch, took over, and the Apple car was once again alive, but the timetable for hitting the road was postponed to 2025. And at the end of 2022, the plan was postponed to 2026.
After more than ten years of accumulation, Apple has hundreds of automobile-related patents. Originally, people thought that Apple would subvert the industry tradition in hardware just as it did when it entered the mobile phone industry. But contrary to people's expectations, at the beginning of this year, Apple once again "jumped the ticket" - it is expected to launch electric vehicles "as early as 2028", and reduce the original goal of L5 full self-driving to L2+ driving assistance functions.
When Tesla and even Chinese car companies were nearing maturity and began to develop L4 intelligent driving, Apple's active "downgrade" surprised the industry. Even if the Apple car is not canceled today, the Apple car, which will only achieve L2+ level intelligent driving after 4 years, can no longer realize people's expectations that it has the ability to "subvert" in technology. In fact, at the time, people in the industry believed that Apple had lost the window of time in building cars, and it was only a matter of time before they abandoned the car plan.
It's just that people didn't expect that after just over a month, Apple would finally give up the ...... of building cars
Tesla followed Apple's path, but Apple became the opponent that was defeated by itself.
Looking back ten years ago, when Apple launched the Titan program, China's "Wei Xiaoli" set off almost at the same time. Tesla, on the other hand, has been selling electric cars for 6 years at this time, and Google has been testing self-driving cars for more than 5 years.
Compared to the iPhone that shocked the entire industry back then, Apple's car plan did not have any time advantage - an interesting detail is that Apple has not even won the iCar trademark, which Apple has won from China's Chery.
And Steve Jobs, who once led Apple to change the world, has also passed away for three years ...... at this timeAfter the death of "Joe's Gang Leader", Apple seems to have lost its original subversiveness and has become relatively compliant.
Still, there are expectations for Apple's plans to build a car. Judging from the goals set by Apple at the beginning, it does paint a picture of the future that the world's top technology companies should have: aiming for the highest L5 level and building an electric car without a steering wheel.
Interestingly, Tesla, which is now making waves in the automotive industry and becoming popular, has changed the face of the automotive industry in a way similar to Apple's subversion of the mobile phone manufacturing industry. On a mechanical level, Tesla can be said to be useless. But with its huge central control screen, hidden door handles, fast enough acceleration and large enough range, Tesla, which started out in vain, has forced other traditional car manufacturers into a corner - the bold Tesla has a similar philosophy to the iPhone that cut off the physical buttons.
The way Tesla built the Model S is exactly the same way Apple built the iPhone; The development model and operation mode of Tesla and Apple are exactly the same - choose an innovation point in a traditional industry (smartphones, electric vehicles), use their various resources and influence, mobilize the top chain of the entire industry for their own use, and then create products with the best product power, and finally redefine the entire industry.
In the automotive industry, Tesla has gone the way of Apple, but left Apple with no way out. Apple's car-building plan is hardly like the path that Steve Jobs took to build the iPhone, but it is very similar to Microsoft's experience when it built the smartphone Windoes Phone - full of derogatory terms and ...... in Chinese, such as "the first rat and the two ends", "the order of the day changes", and "the death of the people".
The difference is that the WP that Microsoft spent a lot of money tossed was axed after just a few years, while Apple finally chose to stop the loss in time after repeated bounces.
Apple failed to build a car, what will China's latecomers learn?
The background of Apple's stop loss is that after the epidemic, the global electric vehicle market is facing an not optimistic "involution" situation.
Tesla has repeatedly downgraded its cars** and warned of a decline in market demand; Ford, GM and Mercedes-Benz are all scaling back their EV plans or delaying plans to fully transition EV manufacturers. In the Chinese market, the first battle of new energy vehicles will be unveiled at the beginning of 2024, and the news that Gaohe Automobile announced a 6-month shutdown has also attracted attention, and is considered to be the beginning of a new round of survival ......of the fittestIt is widely accepted that the market for BEVs** has outpaced demand, and that global EV momentum is waning.
Many traditional automakers and new players have already launched fierce competition in the field of pure electric vehicles, and it is not easy to stand out in this market. Not only does it require a lot of investment, but it also needs to face many challenges such as technology and market.
Apple, which has long lost its chance, has been unable to achieve the much-anticipated "disruption", and if the Apple car is just a copy of Tesla, the risk of entering the market will be too high, and it is not in Apple's commercial interests - Apple is a technology company with electronics as its core, and electric vehicles are only one branch of it. If Apple puts more effort into the field of electric vehicles, it may affect the company's innovation and development in other areas. The decisive termination of car manufacturing can allow Apple to focus more on its core business and continue to remain competitive.
The same contradiction is actually also in front of Xiaomi and Huawei, and whether China's latecomers can finally break through and realize the great cause that Apple has not completed, we can only hope that time will finally give an answer.