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Apple Met With Electric Vehicle Startup Canoo in Early 2020, But Talks Fell Apart
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You did get the point where there is no Apple product in existence, no partnership of any sorts nor has Apple said, demoed or shown anything about being remotely involved in making a car?
You're mocking it for that, but I actually kinda like it. The VW Bus was and still is an all-time classic design. Sure it's not for everyone and Tesla snobs will scoff, but I can see a lot of people being interested in this design (there's a lot more to it on their website apart from the exterior). Of course, there is a large crossover of Apple customers and Tesla snobs so maybe it's for the best they passed. But I like it.So who else isn't surprised Apple was lusting over their autonomous car being a frickin "future" VW Bus?!?!
Multi-passenger, compact, AWD, translatable storage – minivans are the ultimate. No use for a sports car if you're never going more than 55 MPH or you're stuck in traffic. Teslas look nice, though still quite a bit like every other luxury car. Little worried about the crash test on these.
Apple is a design company. You think it makes any difference whether the car factory they use has experience making cars with “awesome style?”
I wouldn’t worry too much. They won’t make it to market unless they meet modern safety standards. They will, allegedly, have a five-star crash rating.
It might look like they don’t have a crumple zone. But they do. Don’t let a long bonnet fool you that your car has a long crumple zone. It doesn’t, because the large engine inside doesn’t squish.
We can probably expect most cars in the future to have front external airbags that pop out in less than 100ms, triggered by LIDAR. The thing that kills you in a front end collision is rapid deceleration. More than 60g for more than 3ms is deadly territory. Seatbelts reduce g-force by a factor of 2-4, as do airbags. Mounting seats on a ‘sled’ can substantially reduce g-forces. So, many factors are involved - a blunt front end does not necessarily equate to dangerous.
Mind you, a Korean company with significant US manufacturing. Almost all of the US market cars made by the Asian car companies are, in fact, manufactured in the US (I can’t guarantee every component is US made, but cars typically use Just In Time manufacturing, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to import a bunch of manufactured parts and have them sitting around until you finally use them all).
To an extent. It’s not like you could make a Ford Focus from a Ford Super Duty Cabin truck chassis (yes, Ford actually sells a truck model that has a bare chassis for the rear section, to serve as a platform for industrial uses like tow trucks and cherry pickers, that sort of thing). To make an individual electric car would need a new platform, you couldn’t just use a minibus platform. (And you probably wouldn’t want to use “a skateboard with a cab bolted on top of it” if you’re creating a luxury car, you’d probably put the battery and motor mechanics in front of the passenger compartment so as to have a lower profile, unless you’re going for some sort of quasi-SUV thing.)
