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Apple Watch Chief Kevin Lynch to Work on Apple Car Development

Robert.Walter said:
Cars are more and more like consumer electronics every day.

Cars are dispensing with the deep organizational expertise of engine, transmission, and in some cases prop shaft and transaxle development and all the design, materials, testing and manufacturing and related investment and marketing that go into bringing these to market in a current generation iCE car.

There has never been a better time for Apple to try a car project.

Frankly, some currently independent over leveraged car companies with inadequate scale will fail to make the transition to battery only and will end up as a brand subsidiary of another maker (we have already seen this these last few years.).

Apple can make a play to enter this sector, relying on the diverse automotive supply base to provide the automotive components (70%+ of the value in a car today comes from outsourced suppliers integrated by the OEM. It’s way higher for cars with outsourced body stamping, assembly and final assembly.)

If Apple outsources everything but the design, integration, software, supplier management & logistics and marketing along the lines of its current business model, it can give legacy OEM’s a run for their money because Apple doesn’t have to juggle all the balls the others do (as they invest into the mew tech even as they bear the expenses of drastically downsizing their current development and manufacturing footprint.)
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No a Car isnt a watch or Apple TV, Car has moving parts and thats a problem. Also they meet accidents, which leads to safety issues, like catching fire, getting crushed and seriosly injuring a person. These are problems with far reaching consequences. The bad reputation from a car can sink Apple. Too much at Risk!
 
EdT said:
Apple has made consumer electronics before. Not a vehicle. Can they keep making them until they get it right? Certainly. Are companies like Toyota, GM, Ford, Volkswagen perfect when it comes to car designs? No. And for each I can think of situations where they designed something unsafe and their initial response was to deny that they were at fault.

Tesla is the only company in the US I can think of that has started a car company up from scratch here in the US. They initially were very high end cars($$$), they had manufacturing problems and in fact with body fit they still do, and I heard that they are having problems with their autopilot software right now. But they look like they are going to be around for a while. The basic premise and engineering are pretty good. But I don’t know if they have achieved profitability yet. And if they have it wasn’t 5 or 6 years ago it was something a lot more recent. There are other new manufacturers also planning to sell EV’s. Apple probably has the money to undercut and wait out some of them but not all of them.

I live in a state where snow and ice are common in winter, and road maintenance is difficult to get approved. Trying to talk my state into providing a self driving car navigation aid isn’t going to fly here, at least not for a few years. So a self driving car that can handle winter weather and has self driving technology that doesn’t rely on a government funded system for self driving is what would have to happen for EV’s to try to compete here.

I don’t think ANYONE has the car/truck yet that meets those qualifications. Most of the central and Great Plains states would also be a hard sell. Cutting out 1/3 of the market isn’t a recipe for success.
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Unless you aren’t shooting to sell a fully autonomous vehicle into those environments.

It would still be possible to compete there with traditional driver’s controls and safety augmentation like auto brake and pedestrian avoidance (with buyers understanding due to limited local infrastructure higher autonomous functions would be geoblocked or as dictated by weather.)

But if Apple’s real initial intended markets, aren’t the ones where underfunded infra is burdened with bad weather, where luxury vehicles and electric is already popular, they could care out a sizable niche for themselves. Similarly if they are making a bid to enter the taxi service market.
 
pankajdoharey said:
No a Car isnt a watch or Apple TV, Car has moving parts and thats a problem. Also they meet accidents, which leads to safety issues, like catching fire, getting crushed and seriosly injuring a person. These are problems with far reaching consequences. The bad reputation from a car can sink Apple. Too much at Risk!
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Ok, I guess my decades in the automotive industry are trumped by some random poster on the internet.

Fact: Autonomous, semi-autonomous, cars have to only be marginally better at not killing people at the rates full-carbon controlled cars do for them to be a great success.

Demonstrate fewer deaths or injuries /km and insurance rates will dramatically fall over time for new generation vehicles.

In business there is risk in everything, either recognize, evaluate and manage it, or be paralyzed and miss opportunities to grow.

People won’t stop buying iPhones just because an Apple car kills fewer grannies than everybody else. They will celebrate apple for what they did right while killing fewer grannies than everybody else.*

*this was the exact thinking Volvo used to break out of mindset that it couldn’t make a convertible because they were too dangerous (“our convertible will be a safety leader”).
 
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If your watch doesn't work quite right, meh. It'll get fixed (someday) with a software update. If your WiFi on your MacBook doesn't work quite right, meh. It'll get fixed (some year) with a software update. If your car doesn't work quite right you may not have to worry about it. You might be dead.
I've typed this several times: When Apple engineers figure out that the keyboard backlighting does not need to get brighter when the room gets brighter I'll start to think about getting in one of their cars.
 
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NMBob said:
If your watch doesn't work quite right, meh. It'll get fixed (someday) with a software update. If your WiFi on your MacBook doesn't work quite right, meh. It'll get fixed (some year) with a software update. If you car doesn't work quite right you may not have to worry about it. You might be dead.
I've typed this several times: When Apple engineers figure out that the keyboard backlighting does not need to get brighter when the room gets brighter I'll start to think about getting in one of their cars.
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And yet all the hundreds of years of deep automotive experience across a dozen OEM’s couldn’t help timely figure out that their airbags were prone to randomly exploding and fatally perforating occupants with shrapnel.

Ford and Firestone, pioneers in their respective areas couldn’t bring Explorers to market that didn’t throw tread, roll over and kill their occupants.

70 years of experience and tens of millions of cars made, and GM couldn’t avoid designing, testing and making engine mounts that trapped the accelerator cable during passing causing fatalities, and the largest recall of its time.

Toyota and it’s 70 years of quality discipline couldn’t design an accelerator pedal to floor mat interface that didn’t result in runaway acceleration and couldn’t do a massive recall across the line when the first case cropped up early in (instead recalling only a part of affected units for a bandaid fix, repeating this in the next line, before the dramatic death that resulted in the root design flaw being addressed.)

Shall I continue? Ignoring the small issues, egregious examples alone are so numerous I could go on all day…

You are conflating (deliberately? Out of ignorance?) customer satisfaction TGW’s with fatal-TGW’s. These are two drastically different things. (Like saying a leaky sunroof is same as exploding airbags, or wonky keyboard backlight is same as a battery fire.)

Study up on what an FMEA is and then subscribe to the weekly NHTSA recall report for a half year and it may give you some insight into what I mean.
 
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You are misinterpreting a virtue.

The best companies, those with confidence, and the liquidity to back it up try daring things.

They know not everything will be a home run.

But if they want to grow, and address new opportunities, they don’t narrowly define themselves by their past history. Companies that do so die.
 
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pankajdoharey said:
I still dont believe this story, as much as i would love to see an Apple car, i really doubt it is such an Open secret! I mean it makes no sense Apple working on a car.
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Makes full sense.

if Apple wants to grow and deliver more to its investors and society it has to move into segments that offer big growth potential which are poorly addressed by the incumbents in those segments.

As for new large scale segments to move into, think finance, medical and transportation. Any one of these successfully addressed by Apple would give a big boost to growth. Apple is active since years in all three.

These three together are insurance policies for growth. If one takes off, the others can be delayed for later growth or abandoned if they are no longer attractive.

If Apple doesn’t want to slide into being a dividend stock, but still wants to be a growth stock, it needs to pursue such big projects outside the defined limits its past product experience by defining itself, as it does, as a company solving unaddressed problems by reimagining those solutions with significantly better design, software, product and production management and customer support, satisfaction and delight.
 
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mannyvel said:
Keep raising the bar and Apple will jump over it if they want to. Phones weren't "consumer electronics" until they were. Computers weren't consumer electronics until they were. Music players were consumer electronics, but niche.

A car is just another object to design and build.

Can Apple's process handle building something like that? We'll see. Again, they've done it before, they are the few that might be capable of doing it again.

Building cars isn't rocket science. At their core they're simple machines that have had layers of complexity added onto them. Building a car isn't like building a reusable space vehicle. For a normal car, the engineering problems are well-known. The design problems are well-known. The domain is well-known. There are lots of car people willing to tell you what you need to know for enough money. There are even more people willing to give you advice on how to do pretty much everything.

Really, the main question at this point is "what's Apple's value-add?"
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I fully endorse your view here.

The motivation is clear: growth while solving unaddressed need in market.

The opportunity of tech change in this sector that moves cars to becoming consumer electronics products is clear.

Only real mystery is what secret sauce is apple going to serve up that grabs customer appetites.
 
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EdT said:
Apple has made consumer electronics before. Not a vehicle. Can they keep making them until they get it right? Certainly. Are companies like Toyota, GM, Ford, Volkswagen perfect when it comes to car designs? No. And for each I can think of situations where they designed something unsafe and their initial response was to deny that they were at fault.

Tesla is the only company in the US I can think of that has started a car company up from scratch here in the US. They initially were very high end cars($$$), they had manufacturing problems and in fact with body fit they still do, and I heard that they are having problems with their autopilot software right now. But they look like they are going to be around for a while. The basic premise and engineering are pretty good. But I don’t know if they have achieved profitability yet. And if they have it wasn’t 5 or 6 years ago it was something a lot more recent. There are other new manufacturers also planning to sell EV’s. Apple probably has the money to undercut and wait out some of them but not all of them.

I live in a state where snow and ice are common in winter, and road maintenance is difficult to get approved. Trying to talk my state into providing a self driving car navigation aid isn’t going to fly here, at least not for a few years. So a self driving car that can handle winter weather and has self driving technology that doesn’t rely on a government funded system for self driving is what would have to happen for EV’s to try to compete here.

I don’t think ANYONE has the car/truck yet that meets those qualifications. Most of the central and Great Plains states would also be a hard sell. Cutting out 1/3 of the market isn’t a recipe for success.
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Want to reply again just on the market aspect as I disagree with the 1/3 statement.

Apple has given up more than 1/3 of the smartphone market but hoovers up the majority of profits in doing so.

Ford as an example has been exiting both unprofitable geographic and vehicle segment markets to instead focus on profitable growth opportunities.

Being everything to everybody or being the biggest isn’t anything if you go broke doing it.
 
Alan Wynn said:
Three features over six years? Does not seem that is particularly unusual for a new product area.
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agreed. This is called adjusting to market interest in a feature. Car companies do this all the time. They introduce features, colors and packages, if they don’t resonate they get dropped because the interest isn’t worth the on cost from development expense or production complexity.
 
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EdT said:
If my Watch malfunctions I’m probably not going to crash. There are lots of companies making gas and battery powered cars/trucks that have 50-100 years of experience with cars. Including making bad mistakes. But they have a better idea what could go wrong and how to prevent it.

I don’t think that auto manufacturers make good entertainment systems and I don’t think that phone/computer/ entertainment companies make good cars.
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Your first paragraph here displays a profound ignorance of the automotive industry, it’s history and the transferability of ICE expertise into battery electric success.

The second paragraph is a bigger fail because the 2nd cross segment case you cite hasn’t really been tried before by any relevant player operating at scale.
 
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I still remain unconvinced that Apple are making a car at all. This whole project looks like a skunkworks project to better understand and develop AI and camera technology that can recognise the world. It is likely the iPhone 12 LiDAR was a result of research done on self driving vehicles. The guy in charge is a machine learning expert ffs. This will all filter down into iDevices at some point which is the whole point of the endeavour.

All the other stuff about suppliers and analysts is conjecture at this point.
 
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RadioHedgeFund said:
I still remain unconvinced that Apple are making a car at all. This whole project looks like a skunkworks project to better understand and develop AI and camera technology that can recognise the world. It is likely the iPhone 12 LiDAR was a result of research done on self driving vehicles. The guy in charge is a machine learning expert ffs. This will all filter down into iDevices at some point which is the whole point of the endeavour.

All the other stuff about suppliers and analysts is conjecture at this point.
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You could be right. And you are right, it’s all tea leaves and speculation.

It could be for AR phone, or AR Car Play (that integrates into OEM sensors, no that would be impossible.)

But you don’t go to visit Magna’s contract assembly plant in Austria if you aren’t assembling a car.

Im not saying it’s a car, but it’s likely a car.

(it’s not aliens, but it’s aliens.gif)
 
sw1tcher said:
Can't wait to get a Stand Up reminder on the gauge cluster/infortainment screen when I've been driving/sitting for too long while on a long road trip.
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My Hyundai sometimes suggests that I take a break...I am not certain how it decides I need one though.
 
mannyvel said:
Synergy is one of those ******** corporate consultant terms that doesn't mean as much as you think it means. Yahoo had synergy. AltaVista had synergy. Enron had synergy.

In the end, shipping a piece of hardware is shipping a piece of hardware. There's a ton more stuff wrapped around it, but still, hardware is hardware. The process is the same, just more so for bigger pieces of hardware.
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Fine, replace "synergy" with "expertise" or "experience" or "commonality". My point still stands. Apple is a design company and cares very much about the specific hardware and customer experience. It is not interchangeable in their eyes. When you think about it, the entire philosophy of Watch is to get in and out in only a few seconds. Any car will hold your attention for many minutes if not hours while you arrive to your destination. Completely different experience and approach.
 
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Alan Wynn said:
I am curious what features you think he had to axe because they were useless? When were they released and how long were they around before they got cut?
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Does it still support sending heartbeats or doodles or honeycomb app layout? I think there is still an App Store but who honestly uses it? Apple spent the least amount of time on the fitness aspect in their introduction and that has become the biggest thing. I'm glad they have refined it a lot but let's not pretend it didn't take years to axe dozens of features that are no longer there.
 
wigby said:
Does it still support sending heartbeats or doodles or honeycomb app layout?
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Just FYI: Yes, yes, and yes.

(Your point about the App Store is valid, though. I’ve never even opened it on my watch.)
 
This is the kiss of death. Anyone that works on this project ends up leaving the company
 
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