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Apple Reportedly in Talks With Toyota About Apple Car Production Starting 2024
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Psh.. “reportedly”, I live in Sunnyvale and I’ve seen them testing Lexus cars with a bunch of sensors on top, driving them around town and near an Apple office right off Lawrence expressway. They even had set up mannequins on the road, I’m guessing for distance, with a team having set up a table with a bunch of equipment. So they’re definitely going to go with Toyota/Lexus on this one, there is no doubt about it.
When you get into the drivers seat, it will give you a breathalyzer, notify the police and open all entry ways for them to search your car after a Mac Genius shows up to verify you’ve been drinking. 😁![]()
Engineering Explained on YouTube covered that back in 2019
He did a worst case, handicap the EV* comparison of an average ICE vechicle and an EV for production CO2 costs.
*Basically he could find the average CO2 for battery production and for a full ICE vehicle, but not for the EV without the battery so he took the CO2 for an ICE and added the CO2 for battery production.
For an average US commuter, electricity generated from Natural Gas, the EV paid off it's full production CO2 debt in about 2 years.
Yeah, because Musk had a long career in automotive…Experienced people are hired, as Musk did, and everyone else can do as well. Apple has 7-8000 Apple car employees if rumors are true, so why would they all be inexperienced?
Toyota has been working on EVs for a long time (remember the old RAV4 EV from 2000s).Subaru is teasing their new EV SUV, called the Solterra. This is design in conjunction with Toyota who has shown a Toyota branded version, bZ4X, at some auto shows. Looking at the design of that, it totally looks like a rebadged Toyota.
Toyota is taking it slow on the launches but they do seem to be working on EVs in the background
However, a decade ago they adopted the view that BEVs are only an intermediate phase on the road to hydrogen economy, and thus fuel cell vehicles are the right choice. This assumption is based on quite good thinking — we need to go to hydrogen economy if we want to get rid of GHG emissions — but the time scale was wrong. It takes still at least two decades to get to the point where there is a lot of green hydrogen available, and even then it is questionable whether BEVs or fuel cell vehicles are the mainstream. (There are some very good reasons to believe BEVs will dominate even then, but that is a longer story.)
So, while Tesla was busy trying to get as much lead as it could and VW announced a multi-billion program to develop BEVs around 2015, Toyota produced its miraculous Mirai FCV. A bit later Toyota announced it is not going to manufacture BEVs, only hybrids, plug-ins and hydrogen cars. The situation has since changed rapidly, and now Toyota is busy developing BEVs. The Lexus UX300e is not a real BEV, it is just something Toyota needed to get out of the doors to avoid looking daft. The real BEVs start by the model-name-can-be-used-as-a-password bZ4X a.k.a. Subaru Solterra.
Toyota has been active in the solid state battery front. It even announced it will sell cars with SS batteries in 2025. This is nothing unique, some Chinese manufacturers have announced they'll do it next year, and Tesla will certainly do it "next year", but Toyota does not usually overpromise or sell prototypes (Tesla) or beta versions (VW). I take this as a sign that Toyota has something quite promising in the works.
Historically, Toyota has been a Corolla-like company; nothing fancy, nothing advanced, very reliable, very dull, very reasonable. Today, the situation is different due to Toyotas hybrid technology (leader on that field) and Lexus. I would still be surprised to see an Apple car manufactured by Toyota in 2024, but I would be more surprised by the year than the brand.
Reckon it’s called fake rumors doing the rounds again. 🤔😂
First of all, sales numbers are important because they translate into revenue. Of course, it is a completely different thing to sell 100,000 small cars than 100,000 luxury cars. However, the sales figures I referred to include mostly cars in roughly the same segment as Tesla (Audi e-tron, Ford Mustang Mach-e, etc.) Car manufacturing is a well-known business where the profitability differences of similar cars are small between brands. You just cannot put a $10,000 premium in the price.
I do understand your point about Macs. To some extent the same applies to car brands, premium brands exist because some people are ready to pay extra for a car they like. On the other hand, comparing Apple with Apple Silicon to Tesla is not a good comparison, as AS offers something technologically superior and meaningful from the customer's perspective (fast chips with long battery life), whereas Tesla does not have anything similar at the moment. Compare Tesla Model S to M-B EQS, or compare Tesla Model Y to Kia EV6. Each of these cars have their strenghts and weaknesses, and the result depends on customer's preferences. It is a true competition.
An important thing to understand about the great success story of iPhone is that it was not about hardware (Nokia had better) or touchscreen (many brands had tried that). It was about infrastructure and platform. Without iTMS and App Store Apple would not be the clear leader in high-end smartphones. And the same applies to Microsoft. People do not use Windows and Office because they are so extremely nice, smooth, resource-saving, and otherwise likeable. People use MS products because everyone else uses them.
Similar platform game is not possible in the auto industry at least for a very long time. There seem to be two possible roads to market dominance:
1. EV charging (or battery swap) network.
2. Autonomous driving software.
The first one (EV charging network) is what Tesla has tried with its SuperCharger. The game seems to be over in many countries outside of the US, because regulators understand the importance of open charging networks for the local auto industry. For example, many European countries subsidise EV charging network development, but receiving the subsidies requires the network to be open to all brands. Cars can only be sold if their charging arrangements conform to common standards. Politicians all over the world are very much against subsidising foreign companies.
If some player comes up with truly useful Level 4 AV (car drives by itself in most conditions without any need for driver intervention), that player will have a very strong market position. However, this is not an easy road to market dominance. To gain a dominant position by AV technology, one would need to have several years' technology lead, and during those years the technology needs to be sold at a reasonable price, or it does not become widespread.
I repeat: Tesla has got some very good technology, and it has been the technology leader for a long time. Despite this, most other players are not aiming at beating Tesla because that would be pointless.
Awesome! My 2006 Saturn ION 3 is still chugging, too. Even the car shop guys are impressed (and THEY do the work on it! Haha). I didn't like losing the throttle body that one day, nor the night that an ECM connector broke loose and caused all kinds of grief, including shorting out the ECM, but that's still better than $350/mo plus maintenance and depreciation.
I just clocked 206,000 miles on mine!
Yep! They'll call it the revolutionary integrated rear view panel, where you can send messages to be read by the person trailing you. 😆
"Get off my butt! Back off!"
Apple seems to be having talks with different manufactures, looking for a good deal. Anyway Apple car will take quite some time to be available.
I have a feeling the Apple car will be a modified Corolla with iOS entertainment system and Siri AI...thats it.
GM actually assured us that the separator was NOT the problem last year when Hyundai announced that. Hyundai spent just over $1B to replace all batteries made by LG and switched to SK Innovation afterward. So far no problem.
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"One person who spoke to Reuters described Apple's "monocle" battery technology"
Monocell?
Monocell?
Not just GM: https://www.reuters.com/business/au...ry-fires-linked-several-lg-plants-2021-08-27/
this is absolutely an LG problem. Also Tesla *does not* use LG batteries. In the US all of Tesla’s batteries come from their Giga Nevada plant, where Tesla’s battery partner is Panasonic.
I have a feeling they will want to stick out from the rest of the competition in terms of design as well as software solutions hence I think it will be very different from any Corolla.