Curious if anyone knows anything about the situation. The news articles on the topic suck. I'm assuming theres some sort of financial or technological reason that they stopped development.
+1. I wonder if this is another Google Search situation, where car manufacturers have agreed to pay Apple billions of dollars every year in exchange for Apple not developing EV.
I’m skeptical that established automakers even felt threatened. For one thing, manufacturers seemed to overestimate present demand for high-end, expensive EVs (no way Apple was going to build a lower-tier “economy” car). Also, companies just entering the automotive industry (Tesla, Rivian etc.) seem to face loads of challenges that long-lived ICE manufacturers have solved a long time ago.
As a casual observer it seems to me they were simply too late to the party and probably didn't have anything that fantastic or high margin justifying to bring to the table. It's like if back in 2005/2006 there were lots of 'almost as good as the 2007 iPhone' phones on the market they may never have entered that market either.
speculating here.. 1) core focus on products like iPhones and Macs may have led to resources prioritization away from EV development 2), the competitive landscape in the automotive industry, with numerous players investing heavily in EVs, could have posed challenges of differentiation and market entry
To me the bigger question is why they started because I could never see how Apple could earn the profit levels it achieves in its core competencies or how cars would fit into its logistic pipeline…thinking about shipping requirements and warehousing infrastructure mostly and retail a little.
On the other hand announcing an interest created buzz and perceived value in its stock. When the perceived value became realized value in the market, the C-suite got nice bonuses.
Now that the public has more realistic understanding of the engineering reality of self-driving cars, the new announcement will be perceived as creating future value. As the stock market converts that perception to reality, the C-suite will receive nice quarterly bonuses.
I don’t think it’s just about buzz and stock price. A huge company should be taking risks like that. Most will fail, but they will learn a ton on the way.
When was the last time Apple announced a new unrelated project without showing the product in prototype and stating a prospective delivery date?
Or announced a moonshot in general?
Or to put it another way, my hypothesis is premised upon business executives acting in a manner consistent with making money and a C-suite of a large corporation focused on stock price as the most important part of their jobs.
Not business principles espoused seventy years ago.
When this effort started, the buzz on HN was not if, but when all human driven cars would go away. Uber was going to replace expensive independent contractors with $300k magic cars.
Nobody buys that nonsense anymore. So what’s the point of entering a crowded market.
The argument is still When not If. But yes, the timelines were originally optimistic (and seemed so.)
But self driving cars are inevitable on some timeline. Their advantages over self-driving are simply too significant to ignore. And the space will be insanely valuable in the long run.
We've seen this pattern before. Video phones were predicted back in the 50s as being "any decade now but I would take 50 years or so to be "everywhere".
Some things are inherently fanciful (flying personal transport for all) because of physics, but there are no such limits with self-driving cars.
My opinion is that Apple started from a position of “self driving vehicles are coming, how can we be a competitor in that experience?”
They were 6/7 years into the project before realizing that self-driving was a tougher nut than anyone had thought. And a couple more years ended in c-suite saying “prove to me this is with continued investment”
The closure of the project was a grim willingness to admit they couldn’t solve the problem. The fact that they spent so long on it is (I think more than anything) a sunk-cost fallacy.
To add to this, I think it was Jason Snell or Myke Hurley who suggested that this might have started as a Jony Ive project. And I think those have been great, but towards the end it was leaning heavily into form over function.
The same reason Dyson also announced and then killed plans to make a car.
Making cars is hard, the competition has been perfecting it for 100 years. But on the surface it seems easy or at least just as hard as making laptops or vacuum cleaners.
Newcomers are the least likely to nail production and final assembly line quality to actually get good cars out of the door. It was extremely painful and expensive for Tesla to achieve over a decade. (And their body geometry quality is still shoddy)
So when a consumer product maker announces they are going to start building cars it just doesn’t align too well with their core competencies.
Cars are hard and variable to assemble, bigger than a macbook or a dyson hoover.
and the auto maker supply chain is hard to navigate. The reality is many components are made by OEM’s and even Apple can’t exactly dominate every key auto supplier to nail their specific requirements. Dyson being smaller had no chance. So you need people on the assembly line and as Tesla learned that comes with calls for pesky Unions and such.
Then there’s the PR if your car does something bad like a battery pack setting on fire or something.
Likely Dyson ran out of will and money,
and Apple decided it wasn’t worth building up an entire company of designers, mechanical and electrical engineers, supply chain people, sales force, dealerships/ service centres / replacement parts centres etc. not to mention manufacturing engineers, operations engineers, factory space, factory plant equipment, and people to run it all.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 59.0 ms ] threadOn the other hand announcing an interest created buzz and perceived value in its stock. When the perceived value became realized value in the market, the C-suite got nice bonuses.
Now that the public has more realistic understanding of the engineering reality of self-driving cars, the new announcement will be perceived as creating future value. As the stock market converts that perception to reality, the C-suite will receive nice quarterly bonuses.
Or announced a moonshot in general?
Or to put it another way, my hypothesis is premised upon business executives acting in a manner consistent with making money and a C-suite of a large corporation focused on stock price as the most important part of their jobs. Not business principles espoused seventy years ago.
Nobody buys that nonsense anymore. So what’s the point of entering a crowded market.
> It seems unlikely that such a capital intensive business would make sense long term.
People are only getting more expensive, and the tech is only getting cheaper.
But self driving cars are inevitable on some timeline. Their advantages over self-driving are simply too significant to ignore. And the space will be insanely valuable in the long run.
We've seen this pattern before. Video phones were predicted back in the 50s as being "any decade now but I would take 50 years or so to be "everywhere".
Some things are inherently fanciful (flying personal transport for all) because of physics, but there are no such limits with self-driving cars.
They were 6/7 years into the project before realizing that self-driving was a tougher nut than anyone had thought. And a couple more years ended in c-suite saying “prove to me this is with continued investment”
The closure of the project was a grim willingness to admit they couldn’t solve the problem. The fact that they spent so long on it is (I think more than anything) a sunk-cost fallacy.
Making cars is hard, the competition has been perfecting it for 100 years. But on the surface it seems easy or at least just as hard as making laptops or vacuum cleaners.
Newcomers are the least likely to nail production and final assembly line quality to actually get good cars out of the door. It was extremely painful and expensive for Tesla to achieve over a decade. (And their body geometry quality is still shoddy)
So when a consumer product maker announces they are going to start building cars it just doesn’t align too well with their core competencies.
Cars are hard and variable to assemble, bigger than a macbook or a dyson hoover.
and the auto maker supply chain is hard to navigate. The reality is many components are made by OEM’s and even Apple can’t exactly dominate every key auto supplier to nail their specific requirements. Dyson being smaller had no chance. So you need people on the assembly line and as Tesla learned that comes with calls for pesky Unions and such.
Then there’s the PR if your car does something bad like a battery pack setting on fire or something.
Likely Dyson ran out of will and money,
and Apple decided it wasn’t worth building up an entire company of designers, mechanical and electrical engineers, supply chain people, sales force, dealerships/ service centres / replacement parts centres etc. not to mention manufacturing engineers, operations engineers, factory space, factory plant equipment, and people to run it all.