BYD is gonna compete in China, they have said it’s harder to operate in US or other countries with higher safety standards. BYD in fact released a statement few days back about not touching the US market. Apple isn’t gonna just compete in China.
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Apple Spent More Than $10 Billion on Apple Car Before Canceling Project
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From China perspective may be, but not global perspective. In fact most of European Car manufacturers including Mercedes, Volvo among others have cut back their EV plans. Mercedes bounced few days ago, they are going to invest in combustion engines. The advantage Tesla has over others is in manufacturing costs. BYD in China can compete on lower standards, but they are clear about not wanting to compete in IS or other markets. Apple isn’t gonna build a car for Chinese market, and the way EU is treating Apple, they are better not to touch EU.
Most folks are missing the fact BYD keeps the cost by cutting corners, which makes it not pass higher standards of US or other countries. BYD will be a dominant Chinese player, mostly in global south.
Tesla is Apple of EV market. BYD is like Samsung, large volumes in China or global south , but neither the absolute profits nor profit margin close to Tesla. BYD said they are not entering US market. Sure BYD started selling few thousand cars in Germany and wants to start a factory in Hungary. Even European Car makers like Mercedes and Volvo are scaling back on EV, and resume working on combustion engines for future.BYD is profitable. They outsold Tesla last year (again) and are expanding sales beyond China.
Surpassing Tesla, China’s BYD Will Take On the World in 2024
Having weathered domestic competition, international expansion is the car maker’s next priority.www.wsj.com
Not just Ford, GM, Volvo and Mercedes cutback. Acura(Honda) was launching their first electric ZDX, in partnership with GM. They are going to discontinue the partnership soon. Apples best bet was competing in the US, most lucrative and profitable market for Tesla.This is true (and it attracts downvotes as you will see with my own message).
EV manufacturing is a tricky thing, maybe the people at Apple didn’t know what they were getting into or were hoping to be able to play the game without having to resort to the usual things car manufacturers fall into: all sorts of subsidies, sales at a loss, incentives, etc
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Many will say that it isn’t like so, but was checking these articles recently on Ford, quite the regression:
Ford downsizes EV battery factory plan | TechCrunch
Ford will downsize its plans to build a factory in Michigan that makes cheaper lithium iron phosphate batteries using tech from China’s CATL.techcrunch.com
(Postponing the investment of $12B is right at the ballpark of this Apple car ordeal)
Ford hits the brakes on $12 billion in EV spending because EVs are too expensive
Customers don’t want to spend extra on Ford’s EVs.www.theverge.com
Ford halves 2024 electric F-150 production plans on slowing demand
Ford is cutting 2024 production goals in half for its F-150 Lightning EV pickup truck on slowing demand for battery-powered models. Read on.financialpost.com
The Mustang MachE is also getting price slashing:
Ford slashes Mustang Mach-E prices again as EV price war enters its second year
For model year 2023, the Mustang Mach-E is getting a big price cut, as much as $8,000 off for some versions.
It definitely isn’t a “no brainer” getting into EV cars, and I bet there’s lots of red tape, weird regulations and taxations ON TOP of the already existing competition with Tesla and many Asian manufacturers.
They no doubt thought the could produce a game changer, and the teh reality of teh car and EV market smacked them in the head.
Except it was $10b over what, a decade or so? $1B/year is a relatively small expenditure for Apple.
That's a pretty big assumption. Sure, some engineering skills are very industry specific, but I'd bet there were plenty of engineers working on electronics, design for manufacturing, material science, for example, whose skills would transfer. if Apple wants to expand CarPlay those skills would be directly applicable.
Other than gaining knowledge in how to train AI on complex real time problems, how to speed up responses and validate them, etc.
Which right now is essentially just a fancy iPhone external monitor. Apple clearly is interested in making CarPlay more than an extension of the iPhone.
Sensors that don't have to work in a harsher environment like that a car inhabits nor have fail safe and error checking to avoid feeding bad data.
As with LIDAR, the requirements for a car camera are different, and having gained an understanding of what works and doesn't could be useful in future products.
More like IBM's "You want to sue us? Give us a minute to dig through our portfolio to find a 1000+ of our patents we think you are violating or show your patent is invalid. Your call, pilgrim."
That would have brought Musk to Apple and been a train wreck. he'd want a say in running Apple and setoff battles that cold very well ruin Apple.
I suspect hey didn't see enough growth to make the investment worthwhile. While the EU has done a lot to make EVs more attractive, there still are significant hurdles to widespread adoption. One, for example, is creating an at home charging network in urban areas. Putting chargers in garages below apartment buildings, whose wiring may not be sufficient, is a daunting taks and if I can't charge my EV overnight while at home it's pretty useless.
I suspect that right now is due to economies of scale in EVs since the other companies don't sell nearly as many. Tesla is already facing pricing pressure, a sign of a slowing market and increased competition. They need to move out of the higher end niche market, which they are doing, but the question remains is how big is the market beyond the higher end? Can Tesla overcome range anxiety and how do they reach a broader market beyond that served by stores in affluent areas?
BYD would probably have to redesign their cars to meet US/EU standards, driving up costs, so forgoing this market and concentrating on China initially makes sense. They don't have to deal with all the regulations and build out dealer and service infrastructure that international expansion will require; not to mention regulatory scrutiny. It seems they are looking at expanding so it will be interesting to see how fast and how successful it will be.
How is giving you advice to improve your experience, "bullying"? I read others response to you, and you're the only one with these issues.
There's plenty of spell check applications for Mac.
I'm sorry that you took my advice the wrong way.
Yup. I use Grammarian
The funny thing about how MR readers view Apple's software is:
1. If the add new innovative features some will complain greedy Apple just shellacked some small developer and / or they've over complicated the software like MS' products, and
2. If a software feature is only on the latest model they will complain Apple deliberately hobbled the feature to drive sales, if they do and it even marginally impacts performance the complaint is Apple is crippling my phone out of pure greed; and
2. If they don't add features some think they should, the complaint is they don't innovate.
Apple delivers a software set that meets many user's needs and is pretty straightforward to use.
It would have been interesting to see the human interface design in Apple's car, showing their solution to getting the right information at the right time to the driver. Will they have a consistent interface across functions or will it follow iOS and be basically the same with just enough minor differences to be annoying or confusing at times?
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From the quality side Tesla has always been so poor it’s never been a contest. And now they are getting attacked on the price side. Elon is out of gimmicks now.
Tesla had margins of 20%. Even with price reductions/pressures the margin is at healthy 16%. Rivian loses 30-40K per every car sold. BYD is profitable but barely, Tesla can go lot lower and still make the most EV profits. They can just wait till the others implode.
I may not like Musk for many reasons, but he is hardly gimmicks. Dude slept in the factory and assembly lines/literally lived there till they got it right and became profitable. Musk’s advice to Rivian executives and others was live in your factory or die.
Everyone finally realizes that electric cars are only ecological bubbles. They are not ecologic at all and range of these cars in winter is really bad. Bye bye electric, welcome hydrogen? 
Apple was more so likely chasing 'lottery tickets' more so than caught up in 'sunk costs'. Pragmatically there was no costs. Apple was making at least $1B per year on revenue sharing with Google on Apple end user activity. The users do all the 'work' and the 'free' money just flows into Apple. The users do predictably the same amount of work every year so there is no cost sink here because it just get covered by a steady flow from
Apple's product lines are all profitable, so they can pay for their own R&D cost overheads. This is just 'free' money to gamble with every year. Also help to stick it at a project that Google is trying to fund so that Goolge keeps spending more money on that than on something that would be more competitive with Apple's profitable products. (e.g., Google spend more money on Waymo than on making their own SoCs for smartphones. Apple uses part of Google's own revenue flow to do that; so it isn't 'costing' the rest of Apple any money to tweak Google into that investment allocation. )
As Google's payments went from $1B to $2B to $3B to $4B, it just gets easier and easier to toss $1B at 'lottery tickets'. Furthermore, it gets easier and easier to hide the boondoggle on the books.
Only reinforced by Telsa's stock going off into stratosphere. If Apple managed to get lucky and managed to pull something off here better than Google/Tesla/etc it would pay off. If it doesn't... then it is just 'fun' to play the lottery 'extra' cash.
If suspect it is not a coincidence that Apple kills the Car project about the same time:
1. they go to the DoJ and beg to avoid antitrust.
Apple Met With DOJ Antitrust Chief in Bid to Head Off Antitrust Lawsuit
Apple representatives met with the U.S. Justice Department last week in a last ditch effort to persuade the agency not to file an antitrust suit...
www.macrumors.com
2. they Govt has basically outed their 'effort free cash flow from users' deal with Google.
3. The EU is poking around at their 30% AppStore tax.
If the billion dollar 'free' money from Google stops then Apple would have substantially less lottery ticket buying money.
All the folks gyrating about how $10B is 'a lot of money, how could Apple spend that much and not miss it'. How much money got bet on the Super Bowl a couple of weeks ago? How much money has USA PowerBall and MegaMillions collected in the last 10 years?
Even if the billion dollar 'free' money doesn't disappear from Google, "AI" is a far more trendy lottery ticket to buy now. The EV car market has lots of competitors now. It is unlikely Tesla is going to win the "take over the world" EV wars ( not the #1 selling brand and likely only going to get smaller share going forward. )
Plus, "AI" has way more synergy with the rest of the product lines. End users might actually get some indirect benefit for all those billions they are generating for Apple for 'free'.
The spatial reasoning that the R1 does and some of the basic spatial reasoning that a car would need to do has some overlap. So likely there is some narrow sharing there ( so it isn't $10B completely flushed down the drain. ). The 'free' money allowed super loose coupling. If the 'free' money disappears then the coupling would have to get much tighter.
Over the long term it is realistic. However, as a 49'er gold rush contest to be first to claim success not as much. The testing/regulation rigor is relatively weak for the high bar that should be set. And there is too much "if we just pile up a big enough pile of data the answer will magically pop out the other side" hysteria. AI has gone through lots of cycles of overpromise and underdeliver. But if measure things over decades there is substantive progress.
The huge folly of the Apple car was primarily designing around what they wished they had as opposed to what they had.
Pharma spends billions on research that fails in the clinic. So this number, while maybe atypical for high tech, is a common number for me.
it seems like EV manufacturers that sell in the US are struggling, except for Tesla. Nobody has an affordable bev that one would consider mass market, with the drive and drivetrain similar to a Tesla.
As far as range anxiety, I don’t know how much an impediment that really is although anti-ev YouTubers would say, imo, incorrectly, it’s a top concern.
While Tesla is doing well as the major player in a growth market, it remains to be seen how they do as the market matures.
As major company's move Ito EVS, Tesla will face pressure on two fronts:
1. Increased competition putting pressure on price
2. Loss of carbon credit sales fueling revenue and profits as companies needs for them lessen.
Right now, Tesla is pretty much the only game in town so they need not come up with more models, updated designs, etc. as often as others. It will be interesting to see how the market plays out as EVs eventually become more mainstream. Will they sustain those margins? How will they deal with repairs as more Teslas are sold? I'm not saying they won't survive but we've likely seen peak margin for them.
As for Rivian, Tesla wasn't exactly profitable for along time, despite carbon credits; personally I think the are a candidate for being bought by one of the majors at some point.
As for Apple, in the end, I think it was a good decision not to try to enter the car market and compete with what most likely would be a high end model where Apple's brand would wind up competing with known brands that have a lot more cache than Apple would in that market. They're likely better of licensing technology and patents than building their own car.
Which is what is good now for Tesla, but as the majors move more into EVs I think Tesla will face pressures at both ends of the market that will present challenges for them.
Right now, most companies are cautiously testing the water and not going all in because they just don't see enough of a market to support the costs, IMHO. There are some interesting EVs. I had a chance to drive BMW's 5 series EVs on a track and tehy are amazing, plus they are a BMW.
I'm just going by my anecdotal experiences from friends comments where range anxiety is the biggest reason they wouldn't buy an EV even though they could afford any on the market. I also know some people who own Teslas and complain about range and charging availability to the point they ditched them. If anything PHEVs seem to be of more interest and may very well be the bridge solution as battery technology increases tehir range and charging stations more convenient and charging faster.
Successful companies like Apple invest money in hundreds of things that never make it to market. Along the way, new tech is developed and discoveries are made - things that might show up in other devices. The investment in cars was a lot of money, but a drop in the bucket based on what Apple earns. Meanwhile, Apple never touted they were going to make a car. That was for the media and speculators. So, any disappointment lies with them, not Apple.
To quote you “Loss of carbon credit sales fueling revenue and profits as companies needs for them lessen.”
Exactly why the government shouldn’t subsidize industries. Take them away. And they collapse at the expense of wasted money and potential massive job losses.
There is no success without failure. We shouldn't discourage failures. Every effort has a 50-50 chance of either being a success or failure.
aapl car was a bold move
too bad it ended up being a 10 billion loss of investment
the risks of bold investments
too bad it ended up being a 10 billion loss of investment
the risks of bold investments
Here’s the BYD Seal Euroncap report https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/byd/seal/50012. It doesn’t look like it’s cutting corners to me as it is scoring very similar to the Tesla model 3, the car the Seal targets. I think BYD‘s decision to ignore the US market is more to do with the low uptake of electric cars compared to ther markets.