Apple recently announced that it would abandon its 10-year electric vehicle plan and decide to switch to artificial intelligence, and the news shook the technology industry. But the "Wall Street" report pointed out that as early as more than a decade ago, when Apple envied Tesla's achievements and decided to invest in the car industry, people in the auto industry had reminded Apple that the car business could be a difficult game with very low profit margins, but at that time no one wanted to listen to a group of Detroit old-fashioned words, and now Apple found that building a car seems to be as difficult as building its own TV.
Wall Street** pointed out that Apple's announcement of abandoning its electric car plans also happened to show how difficult Elon Musk's success with Tesla was.
The report pointed out that when Apple launched its own car building plan ten years ago, it was difficult to imagine that Tesla, a startup founded 20 years ago, could grow into a regular car company with sales almost the same as BMW, when Apple's engineers looked at the Tesla Model S that debuted in 2009 with jealousy and thought: We can!
When Apple launched the Titan program, GM's top management warned about itTesla's electric car is often referred to as an iPhone with wheels, and many people even think that if Apple enters the automotive industry, the car it will build might be like this, so Apple CEO Tim Cook launched Project Titan's Apple Car program in 2015**, people are quite excited and incredulous.
But the report pointed out that Dan Akerson, the retired CEO of General Motors at the time, said: "I think someone is a bit of a fool." He echoed the sentiments of some of the veteran players when Apple first ventured into the mobile phone space. Mr. Ackerson believes that Apple's investors should be concerned about the company's plans to build cars across borders, saying that many people underestimate the challenges of building and selling cars.
However, in 2015, the market was revolving around Tesla, unsure of the young company's success, and even questioning whether the company could survive. In the past, Google has also attracted attention for developing software for driving cars, but the difference is that Google has no clear ambition in this area, and its founders only use it as a pastime.
After all, Apple has undergone an extraordinary reinvention and development process, so the outside world believes that Apple will treat cars like mobile phones, and even analysts who have been following Apple for a long time believe that entering the automotive industry is expected to boost Apple's revenue growth.
The fully autonomous vehicles that the market was expecting never appearedThen there was an arms race between automakers and tech companies, competing to invest in driverless and electric vehicle technology, billions of dollars pouring in, and all eyes were on the emergence of robotic cars (fully autonomous vehicles). It's just that Apple didn't succeed as people thought in the end, including the continuous delay in time, the continuous departure of the project leader, the constant change of tasks, the Titan project has gradually changed from a fully self-driving car to just an electric car, and Apple, which is accustomed to making profits, is becoming more and more like a "bulky giant". At this time, the outside world also began to suspect that Exxon's statement that "cars are difficult to build" may be right.
According to the report, Musk should agree to this, because he once said that he would consider selling Tesla to Apple, but Cook did not accept his proposal at that time.
Musk would agree to this. In the years following the launch of the Model S, Tesla almost collapsed, eventually succeeding with the Model 3. The Model 3 is a lower-than-the-sedan that has helped reinvent Tesla as a mainstream automaker and further ignited a rush of investment in EV rivals in the U.S. and, more importantly, in China, where the war has already erupted.
The inability to achieve an acceptable profit should be the reason for abandonmentIn his darkest moments, Musk had said that he had even considered selling Tesla to Apple, but Cook did not accept his suggestion.
According to the report, Apple's change in strategy is echoing the chaos in the automotive industry, where fully self-driving cars were on the verge of being launched a decade ago, but challenges in this area have proven to be more difficult to solve than many people think, and now even electric vehicle sales in the United States are not as good as they used to be, and even Tesla's profitability is declining.
Mark Fields, the former chief executive of Ford, said it looked like Apple had finally come to the conclusion that it was "unable to achieve an acceptable profit margin," and it all sounded like Apple was going back to the old path of risking televisions. Because just when Apple announced its entry into the automotive market, in the same year, Apple also announced that it would shelve plans for high-resolution TV boxes that had been developed for nearly 10 years.
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