> Cars are a terrible industry to get into.

Copypasta from a comment I made on reddit about Tesla, many of these points also apply to Apple, especially the battery knowledge...

"You could argue that Tesla is in the battery pack business, and only incidentally in the car business. When electric cars ultimately take off, not only will their vehicles be perfectly positioned, they can sell the know-how to the slow moving incumbent car makers who are struggling to play catch up. They already have a likely unsurmountable lead in battery pack knowledge (things like software to control charging and discharging certain batteries to extend the life of the pack, compartmentalised batteries to reduce fire risk and crucial battery cooling systems), and their fleet gathers more data daily, while the rest of the car industry makes half-hearted hybrids, or technologically inferior, range-limited cars."

"They already own the high end, and once the Gigafactory pumps out batteries in full force, they'll own the low end, at least initially. Not to mention, another industry, solar PV, is growing and growing but badly needs storage tech to reach full potential. Guess who has a market-ready, solar PV-complimenting battery pack, and will soon have an enormous factory churning out battery packs? They are going to sell these packs to the world for decades."

> Building cars is massively capital and plant intensive

Apple has buckets of cash, they need something huge to move the needle and to show the world they're still innovative, and EVs are likely it.

> heavily dependent on supply chain logistics

Tim Cook's specialty. Apple has lots of experience in dealing with a complex supply chain dealing with huge volume.

> and the market is already extremely competitive.

I would argue the market for EVs/autonomous vehicles is quite different from ICE cars. For one thing, existing car makers are only dipping their toes in the EV market, instead of going toe to toe with Tesla directly (e.g. BMW has the i3 and i8, but no high-volume EV version of the 5 series to take on the Model S directly). So it's going to be a landgrab for EV market share. Existing car markers are heavily invested in extremely refined diesel and petrol engines and the associated paraphernalia like turbos, they probably wish EVs would just go away. Also, they rely on service and repairs for a significant chunk of revenue. EVs are mechanically simpler, and will require much less maintenance. So the traditional business model will be disrupted, again something incumbents don't want.

If version II or III of the Apple car offers autonomy, then we can imagine a city car which is designed to be a taxi, which means you only ever rent it. Again, this is an alien concept to existing car makers, who rely on dealer networks selling to end customers. So this would also favour new players not bound by older business practices.

In short, with Apple's battery expertise, huge cash reserves, supply chain experience and the relatively open market for EVs/autonomous vehicles, I'd say now is a great time for Apple to get into the market. They are also betting on the trend of lithium ion batteries getting better and cheaper every year[1]

[1] http://rameznaam.com/2015/10/14/how-cheap-can-energy-storage...