Slashdot Mirror
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."
No thanks.
No, the headline is correct. The car's chassis is made from one giant LED, echoing late 90s kitsch.
The initial model will only come in Bondi Blue but later customizations will allow buyers to select from a choice of designs.
Me? I'll wait for the Flower Power release.
It seems amazing to me that Apple think they're going to get their usual ludicrous margins on vehicles. It's an industry with tight margins. If they think people are going to pay 30% over the usual price of a car I suspect they're going to be surprised.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Used a third-party wheel nut? Won't start. Ha.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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.
There was a time when Apple didn't know how to run retail stores or make cell phones. When they decide to get into any line of business, they hire the best people they can, and they enter the market with a compelling advantage.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Some big auto makers have already reduced development in EVs or have decided to market them in only certain markets
Like who? As far as I can tell most manufacturers are ramping up, in some cases massively so. There appears to be a general recognition across manufacturers that the electric market is taking off fast and they all have plans to capitalize on it. I'm sure some will stumble on the way and some markets will be more receptive than others but that's the way of things.
As for Apple, I see no time now or in the future where they will make their own cars. They don't even make their own electronic devices and manufacturing a car is a vastly more complex endeavour. More likely they'll pay a 3rd party to build it for them or they'll buy out a manufacturer or gain a controlling interest. Even then developing a new vehicle from scratch is hard, particularly (since this is Apple) they would wish to build and own the infrastructure that goes with it.
I expect that's where most of these makers see profit - with a petrol vehicle their revenue stops with the sale of the car, but with electric they can lease batteries, bill for charging, subscription services etc. They see Tesla doing it and they want a piece of that action too. The dangerous bit is that unless governments mandate a common charging and billing infrastructure things could get horribly proprietary and fragmented very quickly.
And you think computers don't have tight margins?
Hardware makers have tight margins. Software companies not so much. See below.
Apple's ludicrous mark-ups? Somehow Apple makes ludicrous markups while managing in most cases to undercut the prices of their competitors.
Apple makes their big margins because Apple is a software company at its core. People pay those big markups for the software which just happens to come with a nice piece of hardware. If you put Windows on a Mac and sold it as a regular PC, Apple's margins would evaporate faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". The hardware is nothing particularly special - the motherboard is basically the same as any comparably equipped PC. Same for the iPhone. It's nice but there are Android phones that are similarly nice kit. But put Android on an iPhone and Apple couldn't charge the margins they do. People pay hefty margins for the software because that is what makes it "special".
Now to the point, I have a hard time seeing Apple as a car company. The most profitable car companies in the world (Toyota, Porsche, etc) have net margins around 10% - compared with Apple's 25% net margins. And culturally being a manufacturing company is quite different than what Apple does as well. So to make cars they are going to have to accept far lower margins, dump vast amounts of cash into building the business, conduct a complete culture change on the company and build a product that is more mechanical than software. That sounds like a heck of a gamble to me.
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.
Making electric car components is not hard, and there are few real gains to be made in the drive train.
Speaking as someone who makes electronic car components for a living, I'd say you have no idea what you are talking about if you think making them isn't hard. I think there are substantial gains still to be made in the drive trains, particularly for EVs and hybrid vehicles. I think gasoline and diesel engines are probably well into the diminishing returns though.
The biggest area remaining for innovation/cost reduction is the batteries, and I doubt that Apple wants to become the world's biggest battery company
Any company that wants to compete in EVs in a big way is going to have to become a battery company or have VERY tight relations with one. I agree that batteries are probably the biggest area in need of advancement and the most likely to see it happen.
A special Apple only charger. Fingerprint door locks, that brick your car if you need to replace them. A big iPod scroll wheel for steering. No left indicator, you can just buy a dongle if you need to turn left. Glass covered bodywork that looks amazing until it scratches and shatters, so naturally everyone will buy ugly 3rd party bumpers to protect it. Apple Maps as standard (that's the joke). The iCar 2 will be 0.03mm shorter, with a Plus model offered if you need space to carry any shopping or passengers.
Naturally there won't be a 12V power socket, just a Lightning connector that also charges the car and is where your seatbelt plugs in to. After a couple of years a software update will reduce its max speed to 30 MPH, to encourage you to upgrade.
This is going to be a comedy gold mine.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It could depend.
The Apple Car invention may not lead to Apple Cars driving the road. However the software learned from making it may be implemented into other standard vehicles beyond the standard entertainment systems.
Lets just say While the Apple Car is a flop but everyone loves the interface on the climate control. Apple could sell this to say Ford or Honda in their cars brand.
Or perhaps the software in the Apple car is far more efficient in using energy so the technology can be sold to Tesla or Toyota.
We seem to expect that progress needs to come from a Disruptive invention however we have gotten a lot of progress from many massive failure inventions. As these failures are often ahead of their time, and may lack one key piece of technology which isn't mature enough or priced well enough to be useful. However the process of invention gets the progress out.
Our Smart Phone looks much like the old Palm Pilot which came from Apples Failure of the newton.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Tesla has not yet shown that they can make money in the car market despite having a dominant position in the high end EV market. They are still pumping huge amounts of cash into the operation. I don't see how Apple can do any better, and they have a lot more at risk.
Exactly. The folks at Tesla are very smart and the business was built from the ground up to be a car company and they still are having a rough go of it financially. Just because Apple was good at consumer electronics is no reason to believe they would be good at making cars. That's like someone who runs a very successful restaurant and is good at it and making lots of money trying to get into the farming business. Maybe they can do it but there is no particular reason to assume they would succeed even if well funded.
They occasionally undercut their competitors. The first flash iPods were cheaper than any other consumer device (including USB flash drives) with that much flash because Apple anticipated the demand and bought up an entire year's flash production capacity from several suppliers, getting a reasonable discount. No one else could get flash chips at close to the rate that Apple was paying for a while. More recently, they've used their cash reserves to build factories for suppliers in exchange for the first year of output from them. They end up paying less for chips than anyone else, and the suppliers then get to keep operating the factory and selling the output after Apple has moved on to wanting the newer process.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
3. Obligatory XKCD reference. Seriously - this. I've got a phone with accurate time that can be in my hand in 2 seconds, one-handed. It's barely less convenient than a watch, especially a dumbwatch on which I either have to press a button, invoke Siri or strike a mail-order-catalog "I am now looking at my watch" pose to get the display to turn on.
Personally (and I've believed this for a lot longer than smart watches have been a "thing") I think there's something to be said for reducing life's little annoyances. Reducing the keys on my keyring, for instance, made a small but noticeable change in my daily routine. I had to re-key some locks in and around my house, but I think it paid long-term dividends. When I moved to a new house, I went to a simple keypad entry system (without IoT) and now I only have to carry the key fob to my car. It made me happy.
So yeah, pulling the phone out of my pocket isn't that hard. But I do it many times a day, so even a small improvement pays dividends for me. And looking at my watch is a lot easier than pulling my phone out of my pocket while I'm sitting down.
Is it worth hundreds of dollars? That's a subjective personal question that everyone will have to consider for themselves. For me, on a quest to reduce the annoyances in life, the answer was a clear "yes".
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
I doubt that Apple wants to become the world's biggest battery company.
Why do you not think they already are? With over a billion iPhones sold, hundreds of millions of iPads, hundreds of millions of laptops... few companies on earth can surpass Apple on battery manufacturing and research and most importantly charging and management firmware. Not even Tesla.
Honestly what company on earth makes greater use of advanced batteries than Apple today?
This will happen someday, but maybe not as soon as people think.
Interesting to see how people continuously underestimate Apple despite ample proof to the contrary.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley