Apple iCar: Specs and Rumors
By: Arslan Mirza
Tags: Apple, Electric Car, Technology, Self Driving Cars, Tesla

The news that Apple made cars has become a hot topic in the industry. The CNBC said that Apple has never admitted to making a car plan, but Cook acknowledged that Apple is developing an “Autonomous system” that can be used for self-driving cars or other purposes.

The DigiTimes predicts that Apple cars will be unveiled from 2024 to 2025. According to Bloomberg News, Apple has also handed over the autonomous driving department of its “Titan” to John Giannandrea, the senior director of the artificial intelligence department.

The main task is to develop an autonomous driving system that can eventually be used in Apple’s electric cars

Taiwan’s Economic Daily News further pointed out that Apple has recently put forward stocking requirements to Taiwan’s auto parts manufacturers such as Heda, BizLink, Heqin, and Tomita.

Apple is expected to announce Apple Cars in September next year and also call its prototype cars. It has been tested on the road in California, USA.

Judging from the signs revealed by the media, Apple’s building a car is already a certainty.

At the moment, Apple has handed over the autonomous driving department of its “Titan” to John Giannandrea, the senior director of the artificial intelligence department.

The main task is to develop an autonomous driving system that can eventually be used in Apple’s electric cars.

Why does Apple build cars?

As early as 2016, Musk said: “Tesla’s biggest competitor is not Google, but Apple.”

Apple’s stock price has been hovering between US$100 and US$120 for a long time, and its market value can basically stand at US$2 trillion.

However, if you want a breakthrough in market value in the future, it is difficult to build on the existing track. Obviously, with iPhone hardware sales reaching the ceiling, Apple’s service business has fallen into an antitrust controversy again.

Apple urgently needs to find a new business to open the situation

The automotive industry is ushering in a stage of rapid growth, and it is a good time for Apple to enter the market at this time.

From January to November this year, 17.79 million passenger vehicles were sold in the Chinese market, and electric vehicles accounted for 5.4%. The industry predicts that sales of electric vehicles will exceed 1.5 million next year.

According to economic principles, when a new product category enters the market and the market share can rise to about 10%, it is often an inflection point of explosive growth.

This law has been verified in the smartphone industry

In the electric vehicle market this year, products such as model 3 have attracted huge attention, and the inflection point will faintly come.

Photo by zhang kaiyv on Unsplash

Apple’s main products are mainly consumer electronics products represented by the iPhone, Mac, and iPad

At present, everything Apple has laid out in the industrial chain is to form a complete supply chain system around these consumer electronics products. But in the automotive field.

Apple is still a novice

But Apple has been planning for a long time in the automotive field. Since the establishment of the Apple project code-named “Titan” in 2014, Apple’s patent application on automobiles has not been interrupted.

In January 2016, Titan ushered in its first major adjustment. According to employees who did not want to be named at the time, Apple is still a few years away from developing “a truly differentiated electric vehicle.”

Due to the lack of a clear goal, the Titan project encountered some challenges

But despite this, Apple’s investment in the automotive field has not stopped. According to incomplete statistics, Apple has applied for nearly 100 automotive patents since 2017, covering charging, autonomous driving, AR navigation, biometrics, and smart hardware.

And the Car External interactive electric vehicles on-board systems, body structure optimization, safety assurance, etc., can be said to cover the core areas of car manufacturing.

In 2018, Apple obtained several patents related to lidar. According to Apple insiders, the core of Apple’s car strategy is a new battery design.

The design reduces the number of modules for storing battery materials and frees up space inside the battery pack, thereby enabling the car to have a stronger endurance.

From the perspective of patent reserves

In 2020, Apple has obtained at least 10 autonomous-driving patents, which involve the three major areas of autonomous driving sensors, communication, and control.

It is worth mentioning that the patent for autonomous driving sensors involves the linkage between sensors and data sharing.

Different sensors correct each other in the process of calculating data, making the decision-making process of autonomous driving more accurate; the other is called the “Charging station with an automatic alignment device” patent.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Besides, Apple has also applied for lidar obstacle detection, hidden lidar, recognition of traffic police gestures, and scene recognition under severe weather conditions.

We have seen that Lidar has been used on the iPhone 12, and Apple can still observe passengers, The psychological changes adjust the vehicle driving mode and other related patents.

Apple’s patents in the smart cockpit include voice and gesture operation of the car

Cars use gestures (AR recognition) or eye movements (eye-tracking technology) to determine the driver’s intention to perform related operations.

This technology is further upgraded and may be extended to passenger interaction.

The current mainstream model of new energy vehicles is to first develop a set of highly integrated chassis that includes power systems, battery systems, vehicle controllers, and automatic driving execution, such as braking and steering, which is called “Skateboard”.

For this part of the work, Apple’s current accumulation and layout in the automotive field should not be a big problem

It can be seen from these patent applications that Apple’s performance in the field of central control car machines and autonomous driving is worth looking forward to.

Whether it is an operating system or a chip, Apple’s technical depth and human-computer interaction understanding should exceed that of traditional car companies.

Apple’s patent accumulation in smart cockpits is even more exciting

Although some patents have been applied in some car companies, Apple’s ability to integrate technology and products is worth looking forward to.

In general, Apple wants to build a self-driving electric car with a high degree of intelligence, connectivity, and integration of software and hardware.

If the car is launched, it can be expected that it will surpass the existing car interactive experience and innovate user experience

The experience in the car scene is a high probability event.

It can be found from Apple’s patents that Apple still has more thoughts on the future of intelligent electric vehicles.

On the whole, it is based on the perspective of future user experience. It aims at various pain points in-vehicle use and future autonomous driving and The evolution trend of related technologies combined with AR.

Can Apple make cars?

Before the iPhone came out in the past, Apple was also a novice in the mobile phone industry. However, mobile phones and PCs are actually products that are closely related to each other.

The iPhone made by Apple is not considered a cross-border, but a homeopathic extension based on past technological accumulation and industrial chain.

Mobile phones and cars are actually two complete products.

In different product fields, the complexity and difficulty of the automotive field are also greater

For Apple, the capital investment is large, the production line and component suppliers have to start planning from the beginning, and the talents for carmakers need to be accumulated.

Therefore, it is more difficult for Apple to bring subversive changes and breakthroughs in the automotive field than to make a subversive mobile phone.

Judging from the current car manufacturing by new forces, various OEMs are focusing on car-machine systems and smart cockpits, focusing on intelligent networking, human-computer interaction, and a more networked user experience.

This is actually Apple’s home field

Advantages, Apple’s iOS-based software ecosystem has been unable to make progress in the automotive field in the past. It can build cars on its own.

Based on iOS, it can cut into the Internet of Vehicles and open up the seamless connection between mobile phones and smart cockpits in the car. This will undoubtedly allow other new power cars. Advantages envied by enterprises.

Building a car is a matter of burning money

At present, Tesla, the most successful car company in the field of new energy vehicles, has been losing money almost every year during its 17 years of establishment and has burned more than 5 billion US dollars in accumulated money.

Despite the huge investment in building a car, Apple is not bad for the money.

In 2019, Apple has 1.5 trillion in cash reserves. All of Tesla’s losses in 17 years are less than a fraction of Apple’s cash reserves.

If Apple wants to burn money to compete with Tesla, then Tesla is not a dimension and magnitude at all

In general, after the entry of new forces such as Apple and Tesla, the importance of core technologies in the automotive industry will become more and more prominent.

The competitors of traditional car companies are not limited to Audi, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Volkswagen, but Tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Tesla.

According to Goldman Sachs, Apple can use cars as a hardware platform to support its services. However, the low level of profit in the auto industry may mean that investors can see a limited contribution to profitability from this move.

But in fact, it is speculated from the focus of Apple’s patents that Apple is rushing to control the technological commanding heights of autonomous driving.

It does not pay attention to all the details of the vehicle but focuses on the most profitable intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit system links.

The other parts can actually be outsourced

If Apple has the ability to control some parts, it is not difficult to make a car that surpasses the standard of traditional car companies, and Apple’s model is still to hold the majority of profits in its own hands.

This is actually a continuation of Apple’s consistent style and model

In the mobile phone field, Apple only controls the core of the chip and operating system. Other parts are handed over to a group of suppliers, and OEMs are handed over to Foxconn, Wistron, and Luxshare Precision, etc.

In the automotive industry, Apple also wants to control only the parts that represent high technological manufacturing and high profits in the future.

After all, the industrial chain of the automotive industry is much more complicated than that of the mobile phone and PC industries.

A car has 30,000 parts and components, and the extremely large industrial chain places extremely high requirements on Apple’s integration capabilities.

According to Taiwan media sources, Apple has put forward stocking requirements to Taiwan’s auto parts manufacturers such as Heda, BizLink, Heqin, and Tomita.

From the perspective of the industrial chain

The current auto industry’s parts supply operation model has been relatively mature, auto market companies are highly dispersed, and the years of development of traditional auto companies have built their own community of interests.

Suppliers are also highly dispersed, and Apple is involved

It is basically impossible to achieve control of the mobile phone field in a short time.

From the experience of Tesla and other traditional automakers, it is very difficult to have a global electric vehicle or car production network.

Therefore, based on Apple’s inherent model to build cars, the integration capability of the supply chain is one of Apple’s biggest difficulties facing the auto market.

Besides, another big problem for Apple to make cars is that the early adopters are difficult to reproduce. The automobile category and the mobile phone category are two different user groups.

Photo by Romain Tordo on Unsplash

In the past, the launch of new products such as AirPods and Apple Watch first attracted the early adopters of the original fruit powder group and then popularized it among the mass consumer groups.

This made Apple’s new products a very smooth transition to the initial cold start stage of sales.

But in the automotive industry, this fan effect may no longer be useful. It is basically impossible for users in the mobile phone market and PC market to transfer to the car market.

On the one hand, mobile phones and cars are completely different products, with different product attributes, user needs, and interests, and there is no continuity and continuity at the demand level.

Secondly, cars are consumer category that focuses on decision-making. Apple cars are on the market and the price is not cheap.

Ordinary consumers can afford Apple mobile phones, but they need to buy Apple cars is based on a certain economic foundation

Apple’s inherent fan base The proportion of China Energy’s affordable consumption is not large.

Besides, it also needs to establish market trust. For automotive products, especially self-driving smart cars, safety is the most important.

It will take some time to verify the safety and handling experience. After all, a novice will end up making Consumers may be more willing to take a look at the car first.

Consumers may have a long wait-and-see period in the early stage of Apple’s introduction to the market

Although Apple is not bad for the money, it is difficult for Apple to tolerate long-term losses based on catering to the capital market’s expectations of investment returns.

From the analyst’s point of view: “If fully autonomous driving becomes the mainstream, then the time the driver spends on the road will again become the focus of competition for technology giants.”

In this regard, Apple’s full-scene ecosystem based on iOS services has given automotive hardware to it, and it will grow into a new service business.

Apple’s product ecosystem will achieve a closed-loop of overall travel from home, mobile travel to the company, and realize a unified lifestyle. Station-style “smart service”.

Therefore, in this sense, it depends on whether Apple is willing to sacrifice short-term returns and profits and use it as a core long track in the future for continuous investment.

Because it is too easy for Apple to make money, it may have underestimated the fierce competition and profitability of making cars and is unwilling to do long-term money-burning projects.

From the point of view of its revealed strategic purpose, Apple may make cars different from Tesla. Apple is more for profit, and Tesla still has the idea of changing the auto industry.

However, if Apple is determined to make a difference in the auto market, Tesla’s market value may be cut by half if there is a small success in a few years.