On Apple Car
The World Wide Web is awash with rumours and speculation about Apple and their potential move from creating devices that fit in your pocket or bag to devices you travel inside. Yes, the rumour mill is whirring and what’s coming out is Apple Car shaped.
A bit of background
2013: Apple to acquire Tesla?
The rumours started flying in early 2014 when the story broke that Apple’s head of M&A (mergers and acquisitions), Adrian Perica, apparently met with Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk in the spring of 2013. This seemed to mean that Apple was looking to acquire Tesla Motors, and the price of $50billion US was bounced around for a little while.
Whilst Elon Musk did confirm that he had been in talks with Apple, he was also firm in saying that talks had not continued to a point of acquisition.
2014: Tesla opens up its patents
Holding true to their promise, Tesla Motors opened up all of its patents related to their electric drivetrain in 2014. Where as before companies either had to spend millions working out how to power electronic vehicles themselves, or would have to partner with Tesla to licence their technology, they now had access to the secret recipe they needed. In an effort to make electric cars more widespread, Tesla saved the rest of the industry billions of dollars in R&D.
2015: Some interesting things come to light
Apple has made a couple of interesting hires over the last year. Hires that could point towards them working on an automobile-based project of some kind.
A look at LinkedIn shows that Johann Jungwirth, previously of Daimler and Mercedes, joined Apple in 2014 as a director of Mac Systems Engineering. What’s notable about this is that Jungwirth was working on both Connected Car and Head Unit projects at Daimler and Mercedes. This background points more to Apple working on some kind of in-car entertainment system, perhaps an extension/expansion of CarPlay, rather than a full blown consumer automobile.
In early 2015, Apple was linked to a series of black Chevrolet trucks driving across the USA with cameras mounted on the top. Whilst many believe this to be part of their street-level mapping endeavour for iOS 9 and Mac OS X 10.11, some are optimistic that this points towards an autonomous Apple Car coming from Cupertino very soon.
Why would Apple make a car?
Apple tends to look for two things when it enters a new area or develops a new product. First, the product has to be something they have an immense interest in or passion for. Second, they have to believe that they can make a product that is much better than the competition. They have to lead the industry in experience and quality, not just join it.
In 2001, with their love of music and disappointment with the increasing amount of piracy, this meant creating and releasing iPod. A revolutionary new music player, with a revolutionary new interface, that took the music world to new heights over the next 10 years.
In 2007, this meant releasing iPhone, a smartphone without all the buttons and gimmicks of its competitors. It was essentially a plate of glass with a few buttons around the edge, and it took the mobile world by storm. You can see its influence on every modern smartphone.
In 2010, it was the tablet market’s turn to get the Apple touch, with the release of iPad. Apple took the tablet from a clumsy touch screen device with a slide-out of clip on keyboard to a world of glass and minimal buttons.
And most recently, Apple is working to enter the smartwatch market, and bring together the worlds of fashion and technology to make the most personal device they’ve ever made, Apple Watch. With a release penned for April 2015, it is yet to be seen the impact Apple Watch will have, but if it’s anything like Apple’s previous attempts, it will rewrite the playbook for the smartwatch industry.
When it comes to a potential Apple Car, there are a few things that could make Apple enter this space.
Passion
It was well known that Steve Jobs loved cars. He regularly drove his plateless Mercedes SL 55 AMG to the office, parking in disabled spaces to be closer to his office.
Jony Ive’s collection of cars, especially premium British cars, was well documented by Cult of Mac last February.
Marc Newson, who recently joined Apple’s design department, has designed at least one car, the Ford 021C Concept.
Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, holds a place on the board of the famous Italian sports-car manufacturer, Ferrari.
Experience
Owning a car is not for everyone. From the traditionally pushy sales tactics at the showroom, to the constant issues with repairs and faulty parts, to the cost of filling the thing up with petrol every couple of hundred miles, the experience has definitely not been perfected in the hundred years or so we’ve been driving cars.
As I stated before, Apple tends to enter industries where it believes it can make an impact and delivery a superior experience. The car could well be a market where they can do this.
An Apple Car is likely to be powered by electricity, plugged in at night when you get home. A lot of the mechanical issues and complexity involved with an internal combustion engine is removed, replaced with the simplicity of electric motors and batteries. (Apple has a lot of experience with batteries, being one of the world’s largest consumers of them).
When it comes to the in-car experience, the current crop of systems feel like they were all designed before 2007. Instead of beautiful, large capacitive multi-touch screens, we have small, fiddly resistive screens that take a few seconds to respond and look washed out in even the darkest interiors. Here, Apple could take what it’s learned from iPhone and iPad, and its existing CarPlay in-car interface, and create a superior in-car entertainment and information experience.
Lifestyle company
Apple has expanded recently. Instead of just making personal computer hardware and software, they’ve introduced more and more auxiliary services and products. Products like Apple TV, CarPlay, Apple Pay, iCloud and iMessage. They’ve recently taken a step into health with Health.app for the iPhone, plumbing all the data from your wearables and lifestyle gadgets into a central, secure database on your phone.
It’s becoming apparent that Apple are not just about creating great computers; they’re about creating great products — hardware, software and services — that enhance people’s lives. Creating a car, it could be argued, is a logical step in creating great lifestyle products. A lot of us spend a lot of time commuting and travelling.
What if it’s not a car?
Whilst there are arguments to be put forward that Apple is making a full blown car, this may not be the case.
Like all good companies, Apple experiments with lots of different products to see how feasible they are. And when those products hit a certain point, even very close to being ready for the mainstream market, Apple has been known to kill them. iPhone and iPad were in the lab for years before they became real products that shipped and you could buy. Apple Watch was 3 years in the making. During that time, Apple will have been working on other projects that may never see the light of day. The car could be one of those.
Second, some of the hires Apple has made line up more with expanding CarPlay into a full-blown in-car system, perhaps overwriting the in-car systems that most manufacturers use today. I can see Apple providing great value in improving CarPlay and pushing for better computer hardware, especially screens and graphics capability, in cars.
Or, it could all be noise. A distraction from what Apple is really working on.
In summary
There is evidence that Apple is working on something to do with the car industry. Whilst it may not be a full-blown self-driving car, where there’s smoke there does tend to be a fire. The minimum I would expect from what we’re seeing is a bigger bet placed on CarPlay, working to improve the in-car infotainment experience for the millions of people who buy new cars and iPhones every year.
On the other side, I kinda hope that Apple is working on some kind of automobile. Currently there is really only one player in the electric car market, and that is Tesla Motors. Whilst I believe what Elon Musk and the brilliant minds at Tesla are doing is fantastic, I do think we need some more choice and competition within the electric car space. Competition we’re just not seeing from traditional car makers, with BMW, Audi and the likes betting more on hybrid power systems rather than full-electric.
Apple is well known for entering industries and turning them upside down. It often spurs its competitors on to make better products, by showing them “the light”. It did it with Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. I see no reason why they couldn’t do it with Apple Car. But, it’s likely to be a couple more years yet.
