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Apple's Electric Car Project To Be Led By Bob Mansfield (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Long-time Apple executive Bob Mansfield will lead Apple's electric car project, according to the Wall Street Journal. TechCrunch reports: "Mansfield stepped down from the Apple executive board in 2013, yet stayed around the company to work on, what Apple called, special projects. In this role he was reporting directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook. One of Mansfield's projects turned out to be the Apple Watch. Now it seems he will head-up Apple's car ambitions -- a project Apple has yet to publicly confirm. During Mansfield's tenure he lead the engineering teams responsible for numerous products including the MacBook Air, iMac, and the iPad."
I mean whole cars meant for consumer sale.
While it's not like they don't have the cash (in Ireland..), but vehicle assembly is a huge job and I'm guessing that many of the parts for an electric car aren't something you can necessarily just get out of the Bosch parts bin or get from jobbers.
My guess is they're building one to try to understand them from the ground up to be suppliers of technology or to lure a major carmaker without an electric car into building it for them.
Odds are, Apple will have the car rolling off existing production lines in China, avoiding Tesla's production woes, and they have plenty of cash to set up infrastructure - you'd probably use existing independent repair shops for your service network.
I'm in the auto industry and I've done the sort of sourcing you are talking about. The fact is that there simply isn't enough margin in a car to outsource production like that, especially in light of the costs involved. Tooling for a piece of consumer electronics you can sell by the millions for a fat markup is NOTHING like tooling for a car which you will sell by the thousands for a thin markup. Unless you are competing in tiny volume production you simply have to build it yourself to make any money. Apple has no particular cost advantage nor any particular technology advantage when it comes to building a car and they won't be able to charge huge markups - not on a product costing tens of thousands of dollars. If they want to sell it and make a profit they'll have to watch costs very carefully. They are simply not going to be able to sell a vehicle and get 25% net margins like they are used to. The financing alone prevents it.
Tesla is actually doing EXACTLY the right thing by going vertical with their production. Every time you outsource something to another company you are hemorrhaging margin and potentially quality. Tesla would be bankrupt already if they tried to outsource production the way Apple does it's hardware. There is a reason that companies like GM and Ford and Tesla insist on doing final assembly themselves in most cases. I do contract manufacturing for a living and I can assure you that Apple couldn't afford to outsource to anywhere near the degree they do in their current products without giving away the bits that actually make money for them.
Sure, the Apple Car is high risk, but the EV is in just the sort of state that the PC, MP3 player and Phone markets were in when Apple stepped in.
That is a wildly unsupported assertion. Not saying you are necessarily wrong but proving it won't happen for quite some time. People in tech tend to assume every market works like tech and it doesn't. The auto industry could not be more different. While I think there is a ton of room for innovation (Tesla is proving that) it isn't going to be easy to turn that industry on its head by just building another type of car.