What if apple made cars

Apple Car

177 ‘Apple Car’ stories

February 2015 — December 2021

Despite years of speculation about an Apple Car, we still have little hard information about Apple’s plans.

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When did the rumors begin?

The first reports date back to early 2015, when a camera-festooned car was shown to be leased to Apple. While some believed this was for Apple Maps, others suggested it looked more like a test-bed for a self-driving car. Shortly afterwards, Apple was found to be poaching Tesla engineers., and we uncovered a significant number of senior automotive hires.

What is Apple up to?

This is the $64,000 question. We know for sure that Apple is very actively exploring some kind of move into the automotive sector, but it’s still not 100% clear that the company plans to go as far as launching a car, which consumers will be able to buy.

We’ve seen three main possibilities suggested:

Some kind of car technology, but not a car

The first suggestion is that Apple wants to create some kind of car tech, but not go as far as actually making a car. Some believe Apple’s primary interest is in the in-car experience as the world transitions to self-driving cars – a kind of CarPlay on steroids, if you will. Others believe there is enough evidence that Apple is working on self-driving technology, but that it will license this to other companies, rather than make its own car.

Ride-sharing cars

The second possibility is that Apple plans to make cars, but not for retail sale. One obvious market for autonomous cars is ride sharing, so it’s possible that Apple plans to make a self-driving car for a ride-sharing service, but we wouldn’t be able to buy one.

A car for retail sale

The third option, of course, is a full-on car that consumers can lease or buy outright. It’s this possibility which has understandably lead to the greatest amount of debate and excitement.

Who would make it?

Assuming Apple does plan to actually make a car, it would partner with a manufacturing company to actually produce the vehicles. Here there are two possible routes the company could take.

Partner with an established brand

Apple has been reported to have discussed a possible partnership with a wide range of established carmakers. These include Hyundai/Kia, Nissan, BMW, and Canoo.

The Hyundai/Kia idea was once presented as if it were almost a done deal, before later being dismissed – though there remains some minor partnership talk.

The big stumbling block here appears to be branding. Existing car brands would be reluctant to be relegated to the role of a contract manufacturer, where Apple makes all the decisions and the car has only Apple branding.

Use a contract manufacturer

The other, perhaps more likely, possibility is that Apple commissions a contract manufacturer to build the cars, just as it uses companies like Foxconn and Pegatron to make iPhones and other Apple products.

Foxconn is known to be working on electric car production, but likely working more at the lower end of the market. Magna is one of the best-known contract manufacturers able to build models for premium brands, and so appears a likely contender.

What have existing car makers said?

Unsurprisingly, almost all are claiming not to be worried. For example, BMW’s CFO says he “sleeps peacefully” while VW says the company isn’t afraid. Toyota thinks Apple doesn’t understand that you have to be ready to provide 40 years of after-sales support for a car, where Apple tends to discontinue support five to seven years after it ceases to sell a particular model.

In reality, of course, any premium brand car maker has to be sweating right now. Tesla is the only car company to openly admit that Apple will pose extremely tough competition.

When would an Apple Car be launched?

This too is one of the Big Questions. In 2015, some suggested an Apple Car might go on sale as early as 2020, which of course didn’t happen. A variety of other dates have been suggested, from 2024 through 2026 to 2028 or beyond.

With no deal apparently yet struck, and no leaks of anything specific, it is certainly clear that Apple is nowhere close to a launch anytime soon.

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Concept imagines what CarPlay would look like ‘if Apple made the Tesla Model 3’ [Video]

— Jan. 18th 2021 5:55 am PT

Even though it looks like we’re still more than several years out until Apple Car might reach the world, excitement is building as we learn more details. Now a graphic designer has created a sharp Apple Car concept that imagines what it would look like with a large 15-inch center console screen like Tesla uses with its Model 3 and Model Y.

Graphic designer John Calkins shared the “ Autos” Apple Car concept on Behance yesterday. It’s based around the idea what “if Apple made the Model 3”? While Apple has already been confirmed to be in talks with auto manufacturers like Hyundai and Elon Musk himself has shared that Tim Cook turned down a meeting about buying Tesla years ago, this is still a fun experiment in imagining what an Apple Car interior could look like. After all, Tesla arguably makes the most compelling center console/media experience in the auto industry.

Apple Car Concept: What if Apple made the Tesla Model 3?

John’s concept is sort of like imaging CarPlay on steroids – in a really great way. The Model 3 uses a 15-inch center mounted touch screen, so this is like bringing a MacBook Pro to a car and blending a the rest of the necessary auto interfaces with what we have with CarPlay now.

This Apple Car concept uses a dock on the left hand side like CarPlay features now, but with this screen size, it feels more like macOS Big Sur mixed with a larger iPad Pro.

Car and driving visualizations and overall layout are inspired by Tesla’s existing experience here but with Apple’s polish and attention to detail.

Check out the video and images below and see the full concept from John on Behance.

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What Happens If Apple Starts Making Cars

It could fundamentally change the driving experience — and the industry.

It could fundamentally change the driving experience — and the industry.

Apple fanboys and Samsung’s “Next Big Thing”ers would hoot with derisive laughter if The Wall Street Journal or Financial Times reported that GM or Ford planned to rewrite the rules of smartphone innovation. But when media coverage suggests Apple may redesign the automobile, even the most cynical car-lovers quiver with righteous curiosity. They should.

Could Sir Jonny Ive be the next Battista Pininfarina, Harley Earl, or Akihiro Nagaya? Don’t bet against him. Steve Jobs’ successors are at least an order of magnitude more credible as disruptive innovators than the heirs of Ford and Sloan. The computer, software, telecoms, music, broadcast, publishing, photography, retail, and consumer electronics industries certainly believe so. Apple demonstrably understands design, UX, and global supply chain alignment in ways few organizations ever have. According to data from Yahoo finance, company’s market cap exceeds that of Toyota, BMW, Volkswagen, Ford, GM, Honda, Fiat Chrysler, Tesla, and Daimler combined. Apple’s cash hoard currently tops $175 billion.

If Apple truly wants to fundamentally transform the driving experience and global automobile business, it surely has the ingenuity and resources to do so. Super-investor Warren Buffett’s admonition that “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact” doesn’t apply. Unlike commercial aviation, automobile economics brilliantly reward the brilliant. Apple is brilliant. Don’t bet against them.

Who knows what an iCar might look, feel, or drive like? I don’t. But the better and more challenging question is, how would the automotive industry’s incumbents respond to genuinely disruptive competition? How might the industry splinter, shatter, or consolidate when truly well-endowed innovators commit to upending expectations around the DX — the Driving Experience? The money, frankly, is secondary; the real issue is creativity and capability.

Consider what happened with the iPhone. Incumbents Nokia and RIM—the handset status quo—collapsed into irrelevance. They simply couldn’t compete. By contrast, entrepreneurial non-incumbents like Google counterattacked with Android. Samsung and Xiaomi—a company that didn’t even have a smartphone five years ago—quickly became dominant players.

No, an automobile is not just an iPhone with wheels. But is GM a Blackberry and Ford a Nokia when Apple competes with a DX, a business model, and an iCar “genius bar” support network that makes their offerings look last century?

The failure of Shai Agassi’s Better Place and the ongoing production challenges confronting Elon Musk’s Tesla underscore how hard being an entrepreneurial 21st Century automobile start-up can be. Musk, whose company is reluctant to hire people from the industry, has bitingly observed that his established automotive competitors are innovation laggards. “I had thought the big car companies would be coming out with electric cars sooner,” he observed in late 2014. Their failure to do so was “mind blowing.”

But Apple would deny any and every incumbent their “too small to matter” excuse for inertia. Indeed, precisely because Apple knows how to profitably scale its design, UX and supply chain expertise, automobile manufacturers would be compelled to react and respond. Traditional retailers smirked and cried “niche!” when Ron Johnson began rolling out Apple Stores in 2001. Yet those stores have successfully redefined retail norms and customer expectations well beyond Apple products and services. Apple dramatically influenced even its indirect competitors.

So put aside its brand equity. Apple’s command of UX and technical infrastructure create multiple opportunities to transform the economics and expectations of every value-added aspect of the automobile experience. Building a car is the least of it. Apple needn’t build a car any more than it must build an iPhone or an iPad (thanks, Foxconn). All Apple has to do to force fundamental industry restructuring is do what the incumbents have not—redesign the end-to-end purchase and DX, not just the cars themselves.

That’s a bold vision for an entrepreneur, but a revitalizing challenge for a post-Jobs Apple. A partnership with Uber, for example, could be as DX transformative as special arrangements with the traffic management authorities in Beijing, London, Los Angeles, and New Delhi. How might Apple leapfrog or reframe Google’s autonomous vehicle approach to DX? Even a modest Apple incursion into the automotive industry would likely prompt an entrepreneurial explosion of innovation—and innovative—partnerships. To what extent might an automotive counterpart of “apps” and the “app store” generate new automotive expectations and value?

Indeed, it’s easy to see how a Google has as much or more incentive than Apple to “own” tomorrow’s DX as the future of personal mobility and sustainability evolves. After all, Google’s Waze is already evolving into an indispensable global DX standard. More difficult to anticipate is how a Toyota or Ford or Volkswagen will respond. These companies haven’t had to respond to a truly disruptive innovator in over forty years.

Toyota, without question, is the real incumbent to watch. If Apple drives into the automobile marketplace, Toyota has the most to lose. Between the Lexus and the Prius, Toyota’s the one dominant market leader that consistently respects design and business fundamentals even as it innovates.

Even if it never built a single car, Apple would likely prove the most serious and worthy competitor Toyota ever confronted. Toyota knows that Apple could design, build and deliver a DX that Toyota’s best customers would like. Maybe it wouldn’t be a “car”….but it would be something that redefined how people thought and felt about what it means to buy, own, and drive a car.

I bet BMW, Volkswagen, and Ford know that, too. The question is, what are they going to do about it? Will the incumbents wait and see? Or will they take the wheel?

If Apple hits the accelerator on its DX option, the next ten years of automobile innovation will be more interesting than any ten years of the automotive past.

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If Apple made cars .

Quick question — do you open the hood of your car? If so, how often? And to do what?Many of you will remember that old joke/urban legend about how if Microsoft made cars, it would crash twice a day. But what if Apple made cars?

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over two decades to helping users get the most from technology — whether that be by learning to program, building a PC from a pile of parts, or helping them get the most from their new MP3 player or digital camera. Adrian has authored/co-authored technical books on a variety of topics, ranging from programming to building and maintaining PCs.

Quick question — do you open the hood of your car? If so, how often? And to do what?

Many of you will remember that old joke/urban legend about how if Microsoft made cars, it would crash twice a day. But what if Apple made cars?

My guess is that if Apple made cars, they wouldn’t have a user-openable hood. Everything that is accessible would be made available from the dashboard, and everything else would be buried out of sight. You’d be allowed some options (different engine, number of doors, etc), and there would also be some customizations available (colors, trim and so on). The end user would also be able to carry out some after-market customizations (change the wheels, add detailing, furry dice, that sort of thing), but these options would be limited.

If something went wrong with the car, you’d plug it into a computer and run some diagnostics. Hopefully this would sort it out. If it didn’t then you’ve need to arrange for the guys at the «Genius Garage» to take a look at it.

Now, how you view this relationship with your car depends on the kind of person you are. If you’re a car person, and mechanically minded, then the removal of the ability to «tinker» would seem like a really huge loss. If you’re the kind of person who just wants to get in the seat and drive from A to B, you’re not going to care one bit about not being able to pop the hood.

See, I once used to be a car person. I loved to tinker with cars. In fact, I’d go much further than that, and carry out re-bores, polishing manifolds, adjusting carburetors and so on. I’ve even been known to swap out entire engines and gearboxes in an afternoon or strip down and rebuild an axle just to check if everything was OK.

But that was a long time ago, when I had more time. Now, when I jump behind the wheel I want my car to start, take me from A to B, then back to A again. To keep it doing that I take it to people I trust, and when it lets me down I let those folks fix what’s gone wrong. I still pop the hood to check oil, water ad other vital fluid levels, and I carry out a visual of the vital parts weekly and before going on a long trip, but that’s it. I haven’t changed an engine or gearbox in years, and the last bit of car surgery I did myself was swap out the battery for a bigger, better one.

Coming back to tech, I used to think that my cellphone needed a user-replaceable battery because it was «handy to carry a spare,» but the truth is that I rarely carried a spare with me. I can build and repair and upgrade my own PCs, but the truth is that I have several projects that are on the go that I can’t find the time to complete. Same with other bits of tech.

The truth is that as we end up with less time but more money in out pockets, using that spare time we have to fix stuff seems like a bad deal, and more and more people are choosing to pay someone else to fix the broken stuff in their lives. If it can’t be fixed, replace it.

The point I’m getting at here is that what Apple is doing with technology appeals to the masses. They don’t care about repairing stuff, upgrading stuff or fixing it. They don’t really care about what goes on under the hood as long it all works. Under the hood there could be anything, ranging from some steampunk bit of kit to magic, as long as it works, they don’t care.

I’m a techie through and through, but I’m also a realist, and I realize that the segment of the market that wants to pop the hood is on the wane.

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