Apple has incredibly aggressive ambitions for Apple Car – report
Interestingly Apple is alleged to have imported one of these vehicles back in 2014.
Other than making the huge error of calling Tim Cook Apple’s President, rather than its CEO, a weekend AutoCar report exploring Apple’s big plans for a connected vehicle is a must read for anybody tracking the story. Much of the substance of the report seems to come from existing locations, but it does drop a couple of nuggets I imagine many Apple Watchers will want to learn.
Here are a few of the claims made.
- Industry executives expect a partially autonomous Apple Car by 2021, with a fully autonomous vehicle around 2026 (as regulation permits).
- Apple is investing heavily in production process management
- Apple may plan to do something with Didi Chuxing (see also here).
- Attempts to reach manufacturing deals with big car brands have so far failed as they don’t want to become contract manufacturers.
- The biggest slice of information to me is Apple’s incredibly agressive sales projection for these vehicles – 500,000 a year. That puts the plan into perspective. This target is ten times the sales accomplished by Tesla and twenty times the combined sales of te BMW i3 and i8 vehicles last year.
The scale of what the company is trying to accomplish is becoming so vast that it seems impossible for it to keep things secret for too much longer. “Such an enormous undertaking requires huge planning and it can’t be held secret forever,” an AutoCar source alleged to have been working with the project is claimed to have said.
