At the end of February, there was heavy news on the other side of the ocean, Apple announced that it would abandon the car project, and the team of more than 2,000 people would be laid off or transferred to the artificial intelligence department.
Therefore, Apple's dream of building a car is shattered, which illustrates a problem from the side, although there is no technical threshold for building electric cars, this bowl of rice is really not something that anyone can eat, even Apple.
However, some people are happy and some are worried, Xiaomi Su7 is about to be mass-produced and listed, although ** dare not announce it, but at least the car has been really built.
So the electric car that Xiaomi can build has made Apple retreat, is Apple's R&D strength not as good as Xiaomi?
As the big brother of the mobile phone industry, Apple's R&D strength is undoubted, and it has planned to build cars since 2014, with an annual R&D of about $1 billion, that is, a cumulative investment of more than $10 billion. Xiaomi Auto has only been in a few years, and its R&D investment is only tens of billions of yuan.
So logically speaking, Apple's construction of electric cars is equal to nine out of ten, but whether it can make money is another matter.
Because the automobile is a fairly mature industrial chain, the maturity of the industrial chain means that the entry threshold is low, as long as you can buy all the parts, you can quickly assemble a vehicle.
Therefore, not only the electric car has no threshold, but the fuel vehicle also has no technical threshold, which is nothing more than the engine, gearbox, chassis and tires, etc., and there are a lot of auto parts manufacturers in the world.
But there will be another problem in the mature industry chain, if everyone can build a car, why should consumers buy your car?
This requires OEMs to have core competitiveness, such as mastering key technologies, brand power, product power, word of mouth, and cost advantages, etc., and both gasoline and electric vehicles follow this logic.
China has a mature tram industry chain, in addition to the two major battery giants of CATL and BYD, there are as many as 700,000 related enterprises in the entire industrial chain, so don't say whether Xiaomi can build a car, as long as the old godmother is willing to spend money, she will give you a whole spicy su7 in minutes.
But there is no such environment in the United States, in addition to the narrow new energy market, there is no mature supporting industrial chain, Tesla almost collapsed in the United States, and only survived after building a factory in China.
Therefore, Apple also has to rely on China to build cars, but the current market competition is very fierce, and in the case that it is impossible to make a profit in the car project, it will fatten China's top businessmen, which is not the result that Apple or even the United States wants to see.
So from this point of view, you can understand why Apple gave up the car project.
Then some people may ask, why doesn't Apple skip China and establish an independent supporting industrial chain in the United States?
First of all, it takes time and financial resources, China has spent more than 10 years relying on policy, and it is almost the power of the whole country, with subsidies of more than hundreds of billions of yuan before and after, to have such a scale of the new energy vehicle industry today, even if Apple is a big business, can it accomplish such a feat independently?
Secondly, technology is constantly improving, and so the United States has established a complete industrial chain, China's new energy industry has been upgraded, with dual advantages in cost and products, Apple can not catch up with such an industrial generation gap, so it is better to rely directly on China's industrial chain.
In fact, the problems encountered by China's fuel vehicle industry are the same, so there is a saying that there is a change of lane to overtake.
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