> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
There is already a presumption that "in early talks" means in discussion of possible acquisition/merger so I think this would be the time to deviate from the source's title.
Possibly like "Hyundai in discussion with Apple about electric car collaboration", or "Apple and Hyundai considering a joint venture for cars".
I predict this will turn into a debacle for Apple. They clearly can't manufacture their own car on any reasonable timeframe...but if they outsource vehicle production...whats the point?
It may very well just be a Hyundai with a design exclusive to Apple, Apple Carplay, and a few other doo-dads. And a ridiculous markup. So why not just buy a Hyundai with Apple Carplay and save $35k?
It isn't an exaggeration to say Tesla is a decade ahead. The market is way too bullish about Apple's prospects here. People are buying Teslas so they can live in the future...Apple is just selling an integration.
It is possible they legally had to disclose publicly. It is information that could (did) materially effect the share price and while it might only be known by top level level staff at Apple, Hyundai may have needed to involve people from all over the company increasing the chance of insider trading.
This is exciting news. At first when I heard Apple car rumors, I thought maybe Foxconn would start trying to manufacture cars for them, and that was a dubious proposition to me.
Hyundai/Kia have steadily turned into top tier car companies over the last few years, and Hyundai’s Genesis luxury brand has been receiving glowing reviews lately.
A partnership with these ascending and well-established companies to manufacture their cars would give me much more confidence in Apple’s car ambitions.
This is pretty cool. An Apple car could be amazing, and something like a small electric town car probably wouldn't be too expensive as a joint pilot product between companies like Apple and Hyundai.
But, here are the big questions. Will it work with my Android phone and my relatives' Fire tablets? And will it continue to work well in 20 years when it stops getting updates?
If the answer to both of those is "yes", then I'm excited.
What products has Apple supported for more than a decade? That's bare minimum for a car. I have a 40 year old car that I use nearly every day (or did, before lockdown) and I can still get parts for it. My newest car is 10 years old.
One third of all US cars are under 5 years old. I suspect you'll just be like the guy running his Linux laptop from 2012 (I still have my XPS M1330 haha, older than your new car).
They won't make a product for you and they'll make lots of money.
> They won't make a product for you and they'll make lots of money.
LOL probably true. I hope that doesn't become the norm however. I refuse to take the depreciation loss on a new car, and if cars can't reasonably be expected to last 20 years (with repair/parts availability) I'm not sure what I'll do. Keep an old Red Barchetta in a barn I guess.
I’m not sure that the general public will own these cars. They’ll be fleet/taxi/etc. Not sure about you, but I don’t pay much attention to make/model/year of vehicle when I get into a taxi/Uber.
The problem with cars is spare parts. If apple handles bumper replacements like they handle their laptop part replacements where they mostly only recommend replacing the whole logic board, I don't see people buying apple cars for very long.
Seems off-brand for Apple. 'Premium' isn't the first thing I think of when it comes to Hyundai. I get that they've been trying to change that with Genesis line but seems like a ways to go.
That’s Hyundai’s problem right now. They are actually making very nice cars, especially through Genesis, but their brand image has not yet caught up with the increase in car quality over the past decade.
A quality car made by Hyundai with Apple technology and brand image is an incredibly good idea for both companies.
It's a good idea for Hyundai, but it's hard to see it working out as well for Apple. When people who use Macbooks but drive Range Rovers and Teslas see this, they won't bite.
It could work the opposite way: a firm might offer a long warranty to convince customers to purchase less inherently reliable automobiles. Sure it could be expensive six years from now, but in the meantime they're still in business.
Or it means they've decided to take the small extra risk of warranty claims in exchange for more sales at a higher price, because it makes people think like you do.
I thought they made nice cars, I had hoped they had a good value proposition. But all the nice bits have a tendency to feel cheap after a year or so, and after a few years the ride tends to go to shit. I want to like the Genesis (even test drove one a few years ago), but it was cutting too many corners to really fit in with "luxury", for the price it was.
"Certain vehicle information (for example, headlights, parking brake, compass and gear) will be available to Android Auto-compatible apps to help customize the app experience, such as displaying different graphics for day and night, or setting screen interaction limits based on when you are driving. To learn more about a particular app developer's handling of data, please consult that app's documentation.
Google may access other data about your vehicle, such as the make, model, fuel level, wheel speed, odometer and gear, and whether the passenger seat is occupied. This data is not linked to your Google account and will be used in accordance with the Google Privacy Policy."
I've worked extensively on automotive sensors. You cannot obtain these without CAN bus access. This is just a subset of channels in their disclosure.
The specific sensor CAN messages, for example, can then be translated to any protocol and passed over an API to the phone from the infotainment device. The phone does not have access to CAN.
No car manufacturer would be crazy enough to allow a USB device direct access to a CAN network (unclear how you would even accomplish that electrically).
"The most common way Android Auto is deployed is via an Android mobile device running the Android Auto app, acting as a master to a vehicle's dashboard head unit that supports this functionality.[2] Once the user's Android device is connected to the vehicle, the head unit will serve as an external display for the Android device, presenting supported software in a car-specific user interface provided by the Android Auto app.[2][3]"
You don't need direct access to the CAN bus, you just need something that has access to it give you a data feed with those values. Which is how it's done in any of the entertainment systems I've worked on. (I interpret the question to be about direct bus access because something being able to just write to the bus and cause issues is typically what people are concerned about. Obviously the values originally come from the bus, and the data feed can be quite raw)
I agree! The boston dynamics buy was shocking. I get that they don't have the clearest business sales plan in the world or the biggest profits in the world, but I love seeing their robots do things.
Follow what Martin Wöhrle has been up to. imo SK is poised to become a real leader the future of transportation. I've been fortunate enough to have taken the last year off as a sabbatical and spent almost a year in Seoul both getting to know my in-laws and getting to know the Korean tech ecosystem. There is a real push by the top of SK to have the Chaebols play well together on "paradigm shifting" transit technology. I had the pleasure of meeting some super cool people (mostly French and German) at Hyundai(/and kia) working on really really interesting transit models.
Honestly probably what you already know. When you're effectively a nation state like SK (with all due respect), it's super easy to have conversations among all the players about linking (all) the traffic management systems to the modalities to the consumer experience, air or ground. Koreans are very used to multimodal transit, and have a rapid adoption rate of new technologies. If you're comfortable creating an integrated("open") information traffic system, agree to conform to standards, things like literally leaving your car stuck in traffic to drive itself to the office and switching to an electric scooter that your car automatically booked for you just up the street from your location becomes a lot easier. A lot of the primitive to create new transit systems are there, it's the cooperation/integration and government will that is missing, South Korea has these in spades.
curious to see what you think about the government's reluctance to adapt though. south korea is one of the few developed countries where UberX still can't operate, and a similar Korean rideshare company (Tada) was forced to pivot after taxi drivers protested. on the topic of mobility: e-scooter businesses are also now at risk technically you need a literal drivers license to ride one since November...
They "adapt" just fine, actually changing regulation to block foreign companies is them adapting. it seems to work pretty well, Uber isn't in the Chaebol so why should uber operate? It provides no value to further the ecosystem in SK. It's much easier for kakao to watch how other companies do it and simply copy it. SK is more similar to China in that regard, and it's probably to their favour. As of December 10th, scooters got reclassified to bikes, so now you just need to be over 10 and you do not require a drivers license. People of all ages use Lime in Seoul, there is no verification.
>>They "adapt" just fine, actually changing regulation to block foreign companies is them adapting.
Can you give an example of "blocking" foreign companies? My understanding is that under recent trade agreement with America, for instance, American import cars are exempt from South Korean's regulation and don't even have to satisfy Korea's local safety standard. There are also similar arrangements with EU and Japan. Also due to the country's lax product liability laws that often favor business than consumers, a lot of domestic, foreign car makers have been getting away with defects that would have certainly raised ire elsewhere. The share of imported cars likewise has been increasing quite a bit: in 2019, there were 1.5M new passenger car registrations in South Korea; 250K were imports -- mostly Germans though -- or about 16% of all registered cars. The share of foreign companies' cars almost tripled in 10 years.
>> It's much easier for kakao to watch how other companies do it and simply copy it. SK is more similar to China in that regard ... Uber isn't in the Chaebol so why should uber operate?...
I don't think I could agree with this either. Both Uber and other domestic ride hailing services, most notably Kakao and Tada, faced significant pushback from taxi drivers. Tada as mentioned by @albertshin was forced to shutdown after the National assembly essentially made it illegal after such pushback from organized labor unions and the taxi industry:
Kakao Taxi can operate because it's app hails cabs that are not owned by kakao, they are independently owned cabs. Tata was shut down because it owned the cabs and the app. Uber has faced extreme regulatory issues in Seoul and SK generally yet operated under the Kakao T model.
Tada's business model was challenged in court, but they won. After Tada's legal victory, the National assembly under pressure from the taxi industry changed the law to essentially kill the "domestic" company -- under the new law, Tada was only allowed to serve tourists and the pick-up's and drop-off's limited to airports / seaports.
Sure, Uber was the first to arrive in the SK market and it immediately faced fierce pushback from the taxi union and regulators. South Korea's transport law does not allow private vehicles for commercial purposes, but it makes an exception for "car pool." Uber was declared illegal because it used private vehicles for commercial purppose and the company subsequently pulled out in 2015. Kakao launched the following year, but avoided Uber's misfortune by using registered taxis only. It appeased the taxi union, but it also meant that the company couldn't make any money and it is probably not the best example of the "shared economy" business model promoted by Uber.
South Korea's "domestic" companies like Tada and Kakao tried to enter carpool business afterward, but, after no fewer than 3 taxi driver suicides in protest, two in horrific self-immolation, and the gov't intervention, Tada was forced to close their shop this year; Kaokao's capool service is limited to only 4hr/day and during rush hours on weekdays. That is not what Uber would have pursued in SK.
I don't think Uber's failure in SK is good evidence to prove your case as many domestic companies, big or small, suffered similar legal troubles and fierce resistance from the taxi industry. I'd generally agree that SK doesn't have the best business climate, but I just don't see where it is necessarily hostile to foreign companies, or where "domestic" companies are favored over foreign competitors; or where all they do is to copy foreign companies similiar to China.
I'm real stuck on what possible value Apple can bring to building a car. The entertainment and technology packages are an important customer facing experience, but at the end of the day it needs to get you from A to B while being shielded from the weather.
Basically all the bits which make a car valuable are outside any of Apple's competencies - transmission, suspension, air conditioning, heck even passenger seating and ergonomics.
The proposal is functionally Apple trying to buy from the ground up a whole new industrial function with near zero overlap to things they're actually good at.
> Basically all the bits which make a car valuable are outside any of Apple's competencies - transmission, suspension, air conditioning, heck even passenger seating and ergonomics.
Except for maybe passenger seating all of the things are commoditised by now, I think.
I hope they take a shot at it, because competition never hurts and they still (despite their size) deliver outstanding innovative products
Apple’s status is based on the capabilities of their products. They try to only make stuff that works really well; as a result they don’t make inexpensive stuff.
But they don’t make very expensive stuff either, the type of stuff whose status is independent of its function, like the equivalent of $800 jeans. They’ve tried a couple times (gold Apple Watch for example) and it did not catch on.
So, I think it’s fair to ask what unique functionality Apple will bring to a car to differentiate it from all the other cars.
And from an internal perspective, Apple leaders have repeatedly said that they are only interested in new markets when they think they can have a transformative impact. So again, I think it’s fair to wonder what that impact might be. There’s undoubtedly more to their thinking than just slapping an Apple logo on a Hyundai.
Who knows what they could bring? When iPhone was rumoured the speculations were quite widely off from what Apple has actually put out.
I think the only real difference between entering car business compared to other categories Apple has transformed is regulation. Cars need to look and behave a certain way because of laws in many cases.
Those aspects of a vehicle are only commoditized if you discount the massive amount of time poured into design, integration, and manufacturing engineering.
It's easy to buy some bolt-on aftermarket automotive product and attach it to your vehicle. Actually integrating that thing in a way that meets (sometimes conflicting) safety, reliability, manufacturing, cost, manpower, etc. requirements can be a special sort of hell that you wouldn't wish upon anybody.
I bet you'd also be real stuck on what possible value Apple could bring to building a phone. All the bits that made a feature phone valuable were also outside of Apple's competencies. Thing is, cars are becoming more like computers.
The thing is - cars are not like computers and will never be.
For most workloads a normal person performs on their computer, the hardware is ridiculously over-provisioned. Most of it is idling 90%+ of the time, the utilized portion is mostly wasted in a sea of inefficiencies. Performance improvements of 100x are not uncommon. To simplify a bit - Apple's business model boils down to selling mediocre hardware at premium prices, and concealing that fact by a large amount of optimizations and polish.
Cars are nothing like that; they're already at their efficiency plateau. An improvement of 10% is considered astonishing. Cars are much more like gaming rigs - raw power is required there, the games are already reasonably optimized, and no amount of sleek design and UI polish would hide the lackluster price/performance ratio. There's a reason Apple is not in the gaming business.
For Apple to maintain their margins, they'd have to sell something like Nissan Leaf for the price of Tesla Model S.
> Apple's business model boils down to selling mediocre hardware at premium prices, and concealing that fact by a large amount of optimizations and polish.
So... doesn’t optimizing and polishing something make it a better product?
You're missing the point: where are they going to find these gains in the car industry without blowing out the price?
Because that's going to bat in the market that Mercedes, BMW and the like are already in. What is Apple going to uniquely improve via it's current core compentencies, as opposed to winding up where Tesla is: a fantastic on paper product that they can't deliver off the production line reliably, with fit and finish issues because they're a young manufacturer shaking out their production lines?
Hyundai can do these things, but they're already doing them. Where's Apple sit in there other branding which essentially makes the product a gimmick?
>Apple's business model boils down to selling mediocre hardware at premium prices
You don't want to qualify that statement to reflect the fact that Apple just become the clear leader in the market segment that cares about battery life, weight and computing performance?
Apple weren't replacing feature phones. They were replacing PDAs with the iPhone. Which already had Win CE phone/PDA hybrids in the market, and Blackberry which persisted a good while longer due to market penetration in business.
But more importantly, they were integrating something obvious: people wanted an iPod that was also a phone, that was also a PDA. Which meant they got to carry one device, and they wanted that to work well. Apple as a computer manufacturer and software company did have core competencies across these fields.
Where is that for the automotive industry though? Apple have nothing to bring to the core issue of transportation which is transportation and their manufacturing expertise is in solid-state electronics, not the automotive supply chain (which is massive). They don't work with traction-scale systems, and they don't work with human enclosures or really any of the types of processes and problems which cars have. The only competency they bring is software, but as a company they don't have a safety-oriented engineering function (AFAIK) so the synergy is essentially "iOS but in the entertainment system".
Apples contribution is "the head unit", and maybe that's enough, but that's not an "Apple" car, and that's a problem - they'd be trying to build up a manufacturing capability from scratch and that takes time. It puts them behind Tesla in a race to execute, and as Tesla has been discovering you can't just automate your way out of a lot of the problems there.
Which leaves you at, what is an Apple car? It's rebadged Hyundai with an Apple headunit in it.
People seem to be making the point more and more frequently on HN, but it borders on revisionist history.
TONS of people saw the utility of the iPhone almost immediately. Camera phones we getter more and more popular, some phones were getting basic web browsing capabilities. When the iPhone was released everyone I knew was immediately interested.
The only ridicule from that era was about the price, Ballmer thought it was too high.
Making the analogy of the iPhone to a car is a huge stretch.
> but at the end of the day it needs to get you from A to B
You really don't understand cars if you believe this.
Cars are second only to property in terms of the biggest investments someone will make in their lifetime. As such people decide what to buy based on a number of factors including "how it feels to drive" and "what this car says about me". Because in most cases they are sticking with that decision for a decade.
If it was based purely on the cheapest way from A to B then there would be no brands like Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin etc because they are based on desire rather than value. And if there's one company that understands desire it is Apple.
> If it was based purely on the cheapest way from A to B then there would be no brands like Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin
Those brands account only for a tiny fraction of the car market though. For the rest the cost of buying and maintaining a car is certainly a bigger fraction of the acquisition decision.
"what this car feels like to drive" is part of the A to B part though. It's engine, suspension, transmission, steering linkages. Passenger seating. It's not a software interface.
Apple had no value to bring to music players in the early 2000s, they had no value to bring to mobile phones in the late 2000s, they had no value to bring to watches in the mid 2010s, they had no value to bring to audio in the late 2010s...
Apple sells an ecosystem as a brand. Whether you buy into the branding or the ecosystem is up to you. Their brand is about status, quality, privacy, identifying their customers as the people that buy their hardware and services, not people they can sell the data to.
Vehicles are about to become yet another electric/electronic device you own. In the same way that my mobile phone has a network of cell towers that someone sells me access to, I could see Apple doing that with charger providers.
If charging stations become self-provisioning, with local power generation and storage, then the cost of actual power transfer to my vehicle has a zero marginal cost.
So in the same way that my mobile plan is "all you can eat" in terms of calls (and data, mostly), I could see how vehicle charging could work the same way.
So buying a car becomes:
1. Choose a vehicle based on status, branding, equipment
2. Choose a vehicle "plan" based on usage
So in the same way as iPhones and iPads sell Apple Music, Apple Pay etc, iCar sells all the existing services, plus allows Apple to co-brand with electric networks. So think "Apple iCar and Shell EV, your safe and effective partners for travel".
When autonomous vehicles become available, you can integrate that autonomy into the Apple ecosystem, in the same way that Apple Maps learns your travel patterns and makes suggestions, Apple can use that data to send a vehicle to you when you "need" it.
> “Apple could see Hyundai as an ideal partner, because when it comes to legacy U.S. automakers, they all have strong union, which Apple would like to avoid,” said Kevin Yoo, an analyst at eBEST Investment & Securities.
This makes no sense whatsoever - Hyundai Motor has a strong labor union with a long history of frequent and drawn-out strikes: http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20200426000206 . So it's a complete nonsense to mention the labor union as a possible reason to avoid US automakers and choose Hyundai.
While this is certainly an interesting point, it really doesn't seem feasible for Apple to partner with any existing car manufacturer while escaping a higher level of human rights scrutiny than other firms. They've had many instances in the media over the years documenting this type of exploitation, all in non-US locations to be sure, but nevertheless, it's a concern that has tarnished the brand a bit over the years.
Furthermore, non-unionized partners seem unlikely to be part of the criteria on the face of it, if you're attempting to build a presumably high-end product like an Apple car. If worker benefits deriving from union activity are a large enough threat to your product, it's unlikely that you're going to be able to command high margins on it, as Apple seems to do.
Lastly, while it's one of many minor concerns, perhaps, I find all of this quite implausible, given the stature of the Apple brand. It's a huge risk to potentially dilute the Apple image with a failed or likely initially not-quite-great partnership with a company like Hyundai. Why do that and not approach one of the dozens of other higher end manufacturers like Mercedes Benz, or BMW, that are likely wanting for battery tech anyway?
Typical analyst BS. Unions are only a "problem" for US manufacturers because employers (and pension funds) are burdened with ongoing health insurance.
If the US becomes as civilized as every other OECD nation in terms of health provision, making it available to all residents and untying it from employment status, then the burden of that cost will be removed.
MacRumors has a statement from Hyundai saying, "We understand that Apple is in discussion with a variety of global automakers, including Hyundai Motor. As the discussion is at its early stage, nothing has been decided."
So, Hyundai has confirmed that Apple is talking with them, but they also said that they believe that Apple is talking with other car companies as well. At this stage, it doesn't seem like there's anything special about Hyundai. Rather, the news leaked about Hyundai while it didn't leak about other talks.
I'm skeptical of an Apple entry into cars, but it seems like it would make sense for them to contract out the manufacturing to an established player - as they do with their phones and laptops. It would allow them to create top-notch vehicles from day-1 with superb fit and finish rather than trying to build the plants and workforce to handle it. They might want to bring manufacturing under their own control eventually, but I think Apple would want to be able to offer Apple-quality vehicles to a mass market sooner than they could build that capability themselves.
This isn't a criticism of Tesla, but it took them a long time to get to where they are today. They were founded in 2003 and its first mass-market car (the Model S) rolled out in 2012. Even then, the Model S wasn't really mass-market. The Model 3 launched in 2017. Again, this isn't a criticism of Tesla as much as noting that it takes years (or decades) to launch a car company with large-scale manufacturing capability. Tesla's global capacity in 2020 was only 500,000 vehicles (our of a 92M vehicle industry).
Plus, even today, Teslas tend to receive some criticism for their fit and finish. My friends love theirs and say that it's like how the iPhone was a complete re-imagining of the phone. They also note gaps and things that make it feel less premium. I think Apple would like to avoid that.
If Apple can produce the designs and partner with another company to manufacture the vehicles, it could get to market a lot quicker with a higher quality product than if it tried to start manufacturing from scratch. There's a lot of politics and tariffs around cars and major companies like Hyundai have created manufacturing to make sure to avoid those tariffs. Apple would likely need American, Asian, and European manufacturing if they wanted to do a global launch.
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To switch gears a bit, the part of this story that seems really fishy to me is the idea that Apple has "breakthrough battery technology". That seems unlikely. Battery chemistry advances don't seem like an area where we see "breakthroughs" a lot and it would seem like something that would also appear in their phones if it existed. In fact, a big portion of the economy is run off rechargeable batteries at this point - people demand phones with bigger batteries, Tesla is doing everything it can to make batteries cheaper and better, VW/Hyundai/Kia/GM/Ford/etc. are all trying to get electric cars that work well, power grid storage gets talked about a lot...
To me, it seems like this Apple Car would be more about the experience of an Apple designed product than about breakthrough automotive technology. Elon Musk has said that electric cars aren't that complicated compared to internal-combustion cars and it seems like where Apple would do well would be focusing on the part that people buy their products for: the experience. That is, at least initially.
Initially, the iPhone didn't have any special hardware. While the iPhone might have special cameras or Apple-designed processors today, it was initially all commodity stuff that anyone could buy brought together by Apple's casing and software. Apple might want to design its own sus...
Well, Apple mostly just bought off-the-shelf parts from Samsung -- from AP, to NAND storage, to DRAM, LCD displays, battery, etc, etc -- with just minor tweaks and also readily available to other OEMs. Apple's magic was mostly in their feel-good marketing.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadThe title would be more helpful if it included that information
I couldn’t process which way an acquisition would make sense and then I read the article and it made more sense.
There is already a presumption that "in early talks" means in discussion of possible acquisition/merger so I think this would be the time to deviate from the source's title.
Possibly like "Hyundai in discussion with Apple about electric car collaboration", or "Apple and Hyundai considering a joint venture for cars".
Oh you mean it isn't about an acquisition like the title sneakily implied?
> The title would be more helpful if it included that information
Do you really expect any better from these people? I pretty much expect clickbait headlines or misinformation from news, news wire, etc.
It may very well just be a Hyundai with a design exclusive to Apple, Apple Carplay, and a few other doo-dads. And a ridiculous markup. So why not just buy a Hyundai with Apple Carplay and save $35k?
It isn't an exaggeration to say Tesla is a decade ahead. The market is way too bullish about Apple's prospects here. People are buying Teslas so they can live in the future...Apple is just selling an integration.
Hyundai/Kia have steadily turned into top tier car companies over the last few years, and Hyundai’s Genesis luxury brand has been receiving glowing reviews lately.
A partnership with these ascending and well-established companies to manufacture their cars would give me much more confidence in Apple’s car ambitions.
But, here are the big questions. Will it work with my Android phone and my relatives' Fire tablets? And will it continue to work well in 20 years when it stops getting updates?
If the answer to both of those is "yes", then I'm excited.
Almost certainly not
> will it continue to work well in 20 years when it stops getting updates?
Mostly likely, yes. Apple products very often have much longer lives than their competitors (if taken care of, obviously)
They won't make a product for you and they'll make lots of money.
LOL probably true. I hope that doesn't become the norm however. I refuse to take the depreciation loss on a new car, and if cars can't reasonably be expected to last 20 years (with repair/parts availability) I'm not sure what I'll do. Keep an old Red Barchetta in a barn I guess.
A quality car made by Hyundai with Apple technology and brand image is an incredibly good idea for both companies.
To me/my circles, that means they know their cars are excellent and are prepared to bet real money on it.
Many of those cars are now coming up on the tail end of their manufacturer warranty, and still command insane resale price for what they are.
That's not even mentioning Mitsubishi's 10 year-warranty, Tesla's 8-year warranty, and Kia's 7-year warranty.
Hyundai is good but not that exceptional.
Ref: https://www.whichcar.com.au/car-advice/which-car-manufacture...
I know Hyundai and Kia have a crazy amount of engineering overlap, but regardless you are correct.
source: work in the industry in this area.
Source: android auto data notice from the app
"Certain vehicle information (for example, headlights, parking brake, compass and gear) will be available to Android Auto-compatible apps to help customize the app experience, such as displaying different graphics for day and night, or setting screen interaction limits based on when you are driving. To learn more about a particular app developer's handling of data, please consult that app's documentation.
Google may access other data about your vehicle, such as the make, model, fuel level, wheel speed, odometer and gear, and whether the passenger seat is occupied. This data is not linked to your Google account and will be used in accordance with the Google Privacy Policy."
I've worked extensively on automotive sensors. You cannot obtain these without CAN bus access. This is just a subset of channels in their disclosure.
The IVI has access to CAN.
The specific sensor CAN messages, for example, can then be translated to any protocol and passed over an API to the phone from the infotainment device. The phone does not have access to CAN.
No car manufacturer would be crazy enough to allow a USB device direct access to a CAN network (unclear how you would even accomplish that electrically).
I never claimed the phone can connect to CAN.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
If you want to learn more, please let me know.
Initially, you can check out the Android Auto wiki page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Auto
"The most common way Android Auto is deployed is via an Android mobile device running the Android Auto app, acting as a master to a vehicle's dashboard head unit that supports this functionality.[2] Once the user's Android device is connected to the vehicle, the head unit will serve as an external display for the Android device, presenting supported software in a car-specific user interface provided by the Android Auto app.[2][3]"
https://www.slideshare.net/dhiraj007/android-auto-43273422
They already have your location via phone if permission is granted. ...
There is a specific, fairly narrow protocol between the phone and vehicle that enables android auto.
Source: work in the industry in this area.
as trendy as tsmc might be these days - apple might end up going for abb, siemens, toshiba engines
That could be very interesting if things go well with Apple.
Can you give an example of "blocking" foreign companies? My understanding is that under recent trade agreement with America, for instance, American import cars are exempt from South Korean's regulation and don't even have to satisfy Korea's local safety standard. There are also similar arrangements with EU and Japan. Also due to the country's lax product liability laws that often favor business than consumers, a lot of domestic, foreign car makers have been getting away with defects that would have certainly raised ire elsewhere. The share of imported cars likewise has been increasing quite a bit: in 2019, there were 1.5M new passenger car registrations in South Korea; 250K were imports -- mostly Germans though -- or about 16% of all registered cars. The share of foreign companies' cars almost tripled in 10 years.
>> It's much easier for kakao to watch how other companies do it and simply copy it. SK is more similar to China in that regard ... Uber isn't in the Chaebol so why should uber operate?...
I don't think I could agree with this either. Both Uber and other domestic ride hailing services, most notably Kakao and Tada, faced significant pushback from taxi drivers. Tada as mentioned by @albertshin was forced to shutdown after the National assembly essentially made it illegal after such pushback from organized labor unions and the taxi industry:
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3076144/sou...
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the militant labor movement in SK, but I don't there is hardly anything equivalent to this elsewhere in China.
Sure, Uber was the first to arrive in the SK market and it immediately faced fierce pushback from the taxi union and regulators. South Korea's transport law does not allow private vehicles for commercial purposes, but it makes an exception for "car pool." Uber was declared illegal because it used private vehicles for commercial purppose and the company subsequently pulled out in 2015. Kakao launched the following year, but avoided Uber's misfortune by using registered taxis only. It appeased the taxi union, but it also meant that the company couldn't make any money and it is probably not the best example of the "shared economy" business model promoted by Uber.
South Korea's "domestic" companies like Tada and Kakao tried to enter carpool business afterward, but, after no fewer than 3 taxi driver suicides in protest, two in horrific self-immolation, and the gov't intervention, Tada was forced to close their shop this year; Kaokao's capool service is limited to only 4hr/day and during rush hours on weekdays. That is not what Uber would have pursued in SK.
I don't think Uber's failure in SK is good evidence to prove your case as many domestic companies, big or small, suffered similar legal troubles and fierce resistance from the taxi industry. I'd generally agree that SK doesn't have the best business climate, but I just don't see where it is necessarily hostile to foreign companies, or where "domestic" companies are favored over foreign competitors; or where all they do is to copy foreign companies similiar to China.
Hyundai seems like they might be paying their employees, which seems a little off-brand for a company like Apple.
Basically all the bits which make a car valuable are outside any of Apple's competencies - transmission, suspension, air conditioning, heck even passenger seating and ergonomics.
The proposal is functionally Apple trying to buy from the ground up a whole new industrial function with near zero overlap to things they're actually good at.
Except for maybe passenger seating all of the things are commoditised by now, I think.
I hope they take a shot at it, because competition never hurts and they still (despite their size) deliver outstanding innovative products
Honda sells commodities. Maserati sells status.
Motorola sells commodities. Apple sells status.
Computers are commodities, smart phones are commodities and at the end of day none of that stops people from buying from apple
Cars make a ton of sense for apple because it’s a product which a decent percentage of people will all pay a premium to get the cool version.
But they don’t make very expensive stuff either, the type of stuff whose status is independent of its function, like the equivalent of $800 jeans. They’ve tried a couple times (gold Apple Watch for example) and it did not catch on.
So, I think it’s fair to ask what unique functionality Apple will bring to a car to differentiate it from all the other cars.
And from an internal perspective, Apple leaders have repeatedly said that they are only interested in new markets when they think they can have a transformative impact. So again, I think it’s fair to wonder what that impact might be. There’s undoubtedly more to their thinking than just slapping an Apple logo on a Hyundai.
I think the only real difference between entering car business compared to other categories Apple has transformed is regulation. Cars need to look and behave a certain way because of laws in many cases.
It's easy to buy some bolt-on aftermarket automotive product and attach it to your vehicle. Actually integrating that thing in a way that meets (sometimes conflicting) safety, reliability, manufacturing, cost, manpower, etc. requirements can be a special sort of hell that you wouldn't wish upon anybody.
For most workloads a normal person performs on their computer, the hardware is ridiculously over-provisioned. Most of it is idling 90%+ of the time, the utilized portion is mostly wasted in a sea of inefficiencies. Performance improvements of 100x are not uncommon. To simplify a bit - Apple's business model boils down to selling mediocre hardware at premium prices, and concealing that fact by a large amount of optimizations and polish.
Cars are nothing like that; they're already at their efficiency plateau. An improvement of 10% is considered astonishing. Cars are much more like gaming rigs - raw power is required there, the games are already reasonably optimized, and no amount of sleek design and UI polish would hide the lackluster price/performance ratio. There's a reason Apple is not in the gaming business.
For Apple to maintain their margins, they'd have to sell something like Nissan Leaf for the price of Tesla Model S.
So... doesn’t optimizing and polishing something make it a better product?
Because that's going to bat in the market that Mercedes, BMW and the like are already in. What is Apple going to uniquely improve via it's current core compentencies, as opposed to winding up where Tesla is: a fantastic on paper product that they can't deliver off the production line reliably, with fit and finish issues because they're a young manufacturer shaking out their production lines?
Hyundai can do these things, but they're already doing them. Where's Apple sit in there other branding which essentially makes the product a gimmick?
You don't want to qualify that statement to reflect the fact that Apple just become the clear leader in the market segment that cares about battery life, weight and computing performance?
But more importantly, they were integrating something obvious: people wanted an iPod that was also a phone, that was also a PDA. Which meant they got to carry one device, and they wanted that to work well. Apple as a computer manufacturer and software company did have core competencies across these fields.
Where is that for the automotive industry though? Apple have nothing to bring to the core issue of transportation which is transportation and their manufacturing expertise is in solid-state electronics, not the automotive supply chain (which is massive). They don't work with traction-scale systems, and they don't work with human enclosures or really any of the types of processes and problems which cars have. The only competency they bring is software, but as a company they don't have a safety-oriented engineering function (AFAIK) so the synergy is essentially "iOS but in the entertainment system".
Apples contribution is "the head unit", and maybe that's enough, but that's not an "Apple" car, and that's a problem - they'd be trying to build up a manufacturing capability from scratch and that takes time. It puts them behind Tesla in a race to execute, and as Tesla has been discovering you can't just automate your way out of a lot of the problems there.
Which leaves you at, what is an Apple car? It's rebadged Hyundai with an Apple headunit in it.
TONS of people saw the utility of the iPhone almost immediately. Camera phones we getter more and more popular, some phones were getting basic web browsing capabilities. When the iPhone was released everyone I knew was immediately interested.
The only ridicule from that era was about the price, Ballmer thought it was too high.
Making the analogy of the iPhone to a car is a huge stretch.
You really don't understand cars if you believe this.
Cars are second only to property in terms of the biggest investments someone will make in their lifetime. As such people decide what to buy based on a number of factors including "how it feels to drive" and "what this car says about me". Because in most cases they are sticking with that decision for a decade.
If it was based purely on the cheapest way from A to B then there would be no brands like Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin etc because they are based on desire rather than value. And if there's one company that understands desire it is Apple.
Those brands account only for a tiny fraction of the car market though. For the rest the cost of buying and maintaining a car is certainly a bigger fraction of the acquisition decision.
Apple sells an ecosystem as a brand. Whether you buy into the branding or the ecosystem is up to you. Their brand is about status, quality, privacy, identifying their customers as the people that buy their hardware and services, not people they can sell the data to.
Vehicles are about to become yet another electric/electronic device you own. In the same way that my mobile phone has a network of cell towers that someone sells me access to, I could see Apple doing that with charger providers.
If charging stations become self-provisioning, with local power generation and storage, then the cost of actual power transfer to my vehicle has a zero marginal cost.
So in the same way that my mobile plan is "all you can eat" in terms of calls (and data, mostly), I could see how vehicle charging could work the same way.
So buying a car becomes: 1. Choose a vehicle based on status, branding, equipment 2. Choose a vehicle "plan" based on usage
So in the same way as iPhones and iPads sell Apple Music, Apple Pay etc, iCar sells all the existing services, plus allows Apple to co-brand with electric networks. So think "Apple iCar and Shell EV, your safe and effective partners for travel".
When autonomous vehicles become available, you can integrate that autonomy into the Apple ecosystem, in the same way that Apple Maps learns your travel patterns and makes suggestions, Apple can use that data to send a vehicle to you when you "need" it.
This makes no sense whatsoever - Hyundai Motor has a strong labor union with a long history of frequent and drawn-out strikes: http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20200426000206 . So it's a complete nonsense to mention the labor union as a possible reason to avoid US automakers and choose Hyundai.
Hyundai's assembly line in the US seems to be in Alabama:
https://www.hmmausa.com
Furthermore, non-unionized partners seem unlikely to be part of the criteria on the face of it, if you're attempting to build a presumably high-end product like an Apple car. If worker benefits deriving from union activity are a large enough threat to your product, it's unlikely that you're going to be able to command high margins on it, as Apple seems to do.
Lastly, while it's one of many minor concerns, perhaps, I find all of this quite implausible, given the stature of the Apple brand. It's a huge risk to potentially dilute the Apple image with a failed or likely initially not-quite-great partnership with a company like Hyundai. Why do that and not approach one of the dozens of other higher end manufacturers like Mercedes Benz, or BMW, that are likely wanting for battery tech anyway?
If the US becomes as civilized as every other OECD nation in terms of health provision, making it available to all residents and untying it from employment status, then the burden of that cost will be removed.
MacRumors has a statement from Hyundai saying, "We understand that Apple is in discussion with a variety of global automakers, including Hyundai Motor. As the discussion is at its early stage, nothing has been decided."
So, Hyundai has confirmed that Apple is talking with them, but they also said that they believe that Apple is talking with other car companies as well. At this stage, it doesn't seem like there's anything special about Hyundai. Rather, the news leaked about Hyundai while it didn't leak about other talks.
I'm skeptical of an Apple entry into cars, but it seems like it would make sense for them to contract out the manufacturing to an established player - as they do with their phones and laptops. It would allow them to create top-notch vehicles from day-1 with superb fit and finish rather than trying to build the plants and workforce to handle it. They might want to bring manufacturing under their own control eventually, but I think Apple would want to be able to offer Apple-quality vehicles to a mass market sooner than they could build that capability themselves.
This isn't a criticism of Tesla, but it took them a long time to get to where they are today. They were founded in 2003 and its first mass-market car (the Model S) rolled out in 2012. Even then, the Model S wasn't really mass-market. The Model 3 launched in 2017. Again, this isn't a criticism of Tesla as much as noting that it takes years (or decades) to launch a car company with large-scale manufacturing capability. Tesla's global capacity in 2020 was only 500,000 vehicles (our of a 92M vehicle industry).
Plus, even today, Teslas tend to receive some criticism for their fit and finish. My friends love theirs and say that it's like how the iPhone was a complete re-imagining of the phone. They also note gaps and things that make it feel less premium. I think Apple would like to avoid that.
If Apple can produce the designs and partner with another company to manufacture the vehicles, it could get to market a lot quicker with a higher quality product than if it tried to start manufacturing from scratch. There's a lot of politics and tariffs around cars and major companies like Hyundai have created manufacturing to make sure to avoid those tariffs. Apple would likely need American, Asian, and European manufacturing if they wanted to do a global launch.
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To switch gears a bit, the part of this story that seems really fishy to me is the idea that Apple has "breakthrough battery technology". That seems unlikely. Battery chemistry advances don't seem like an area where we see "breakthroughs" a lot and it would seem like something that would also appear in their phones if it existed. In fact, a big portion of the economy is run off rechargeable batteries at this point - people demand phones with bigger batteries, Tesla is doing everything it can to make batteries cheaper and better, VW/Hyundai/Kia/GM/Ford/etc. are all trying to get electric cars that work well, power grid storage gets talked about a lot...
To me, it seems like this Apple Car would be more about the experience of an Apple designed product than about breakthrough automotive technology. Elon Musk has said that electric cars aren't that complicated compared to internal-combustion cars and it seems like where Apple would do well would be focusing on the part that people buy their products for: the experience. That is, at least initially.
Initially, the iPhone didn't have any special hardware. While the iPhone might have special cameras or Apple-designed processors today, it was initially all commodity stuff that anyone could buy brought together by Apple's casing and software. Apple might want to design its own sus...
Assuming it doesn’t require different conditions, e.g. larger capacities.
Every hardware piece was special in the initial iPhone - from cornea glass, sensors, processors and what not