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Hundreds of Apple Employees Working On Apple-Branded Electric Vehicle
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Siri seems to be getting dumber and more helpless as each new iOS update arrives. "Sorry, I can't do that"...
Until they improve Siri, I would not trust any Apple self-driving car.
Until they improve Siri, I would not trust any Apple self-driving car.
That's a lot of if, then, buts
Even with all of that, margins in the twenty's is what can be expected. Except it doesn't account for the realities of the industry. Take that 5-8% for dealers. You can't automatically roll that back into the manufacturer and say it would be more profitable. Why? That 5-8% pays for cars, real estate, employees, taxes, etc. Right now those costs are born by the dealer. The same cost would have to be accounted for by manufacturers with no dealers. That 5-8% paid by manufacturers actually saves them money.
Also, you would see no where near the inventory on lots. Right now, dealers have to eat the losses on cars that don't sell, and with their agreements, new cars keep coming regardless of previous sales. Remove them and that cost goes back to manufacturer. That 10-13% is accurate even with no dealers. What we would see is a lower volume of cars being produced. Just like with the phone industry, ownership changes hands at the shipped level. If the manufacturer is responsible for making and selling, they are only going to make slightly more than they sell.
Our numbers differ slightly but they are generally the same. It's not a high margin business no matter how you slice it. If Apple gets into it, more power to 'em. We haven't even gotten into the government regulations.
Tesla has already done this. No dealers, all stores are company owned, you order online and car is delivered to your door. Everyone pays the same price, no discounts or variation in pricing. All uniform. I found Tesla's purchase process the best of all.
I own a Tesla Model S and I'm not rich. It cost me just over $100,000 and is double what I've ever spent on a single vehicle. Most of the other Model S owners I know did the same thing - not because they are rich, but because they believe in an emissions-free future for transportation and wanted to support Tesla's goal. The car is much lower in cost to drive than a comparable ICE car once you factor fuel cost savings and maintenance over the life of ownership.
Ask anyone in Norway about Tesla and they will know. Tesla is the best selling car in Norway. Tesla is now shipping all over the EU and has over 100 superchargers in Europe.
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That's why people buy Teslas and not BMW i3s, which are a joke. Tesla Model S goes 265 miles on a single charge and can be recharged to 170 miles of range in 30 minutes. The BMW i3 is EPA rated at only 81 miles of range and takes 30 minutes to recharge to 65 miles of range. That means for every hour you drive the i3 on the freeway you spend half an hour charging it. It's completely unusable for anything outside of local city driving.
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Not to mention that Apple would need a sales network, a manufacturing partner, a service network, and a steady supply of batteries. These are all pretty big hurdles even for a company with as much cash as Apple. The battery supply is the biggest hurdle of all.
Why do you think Tesla is building a multi-billion dollar battery gigafactory in Nevada? That one factory in 2020 will make more batteries than the combined output of all the world's battery factories today. And that supply will be needed in order for Tesla to sell the number of cars it wants to sell by then. And that's if 100% of the supply went to Tesla.
There's no way an Apple car is coming. Too much more needs to be done, and what all needs to be done is going way off Apple's track of focusing on things it knows and understands.
According to the CA DMV, autonomous driving permits have been issued to a number of companies including Google and Tesla. Care to guess who's not on the list? Yep, Apple... so let's kill this silly rumor.
So you don't actually follow cars, do you? BMW just announced a plug-in version of all their major model lines.
Apple will struggle to compete in this segment. Period. They would likely have to go to Honda, Ford, or GM to get the car built. But by the time an Apple car comes to reality, all manufacturers will be making hydrogen fuel cell or electronic motors.
The current automotive market is low margin because of the way the whole supply chain is structured. Although the supply chains are very efficient with their just in time production, it is the sharing of the profit margin between thousands of suppliers needed to build a car that thins the profit margin. It is said that in order to be profitable for the manufacturer a mainstream car needs to be sold at least a million times.
The mistake that most people make is that they keep thinking in that model. Tesla redefined its own supply chain. Relying on a small number of suppliers and keeping control of the retail process. If Apple does something similar, then there is potential for higher margins and profitability at a much lower number of sold cars.
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Yet, apple has hired a large number of car engineers (which is no rumor)...
I agree with this wholeheartedly. I think the reason people keep thinking in that old model is it's the only proven model that works so far. What Tesla has done will hopefully one day change the way the industry goes about it's business. The success of Tesla's model has yet to be proven viable on a small scale. Who knows how it would translate as a large scale model. Although I like what Tesla is doing, selling 35,000 cars and losing $300 million in the process isn't the definition of a success model. Hopefully, they can get the Model X to market in the next few years. I'm just guestimating but if Tesla can reach 100-150,000 vehicles a year they can turn a nice profit. Until then, the jury is still out. I hope they succeed.
Also..
Cellphone market is not any better than the car market marginwise for all but APPLE,
Reposting my previouse post re this rumor
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Interesting article about cost of developing a new car .... (If Apple spent 3 billion on beats.... This is a no brainer Even if it does not make it go the market... Just for the stuff apple will learn and discover in the process)
http://www.autoblog.com/2010/07/27/w...op-new-models/
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if you are waiting to buy an apple car dont hold your breath. Car development cycles are pretty long. it is going to take some years. like at least 5 and that is already very very optimistic.
All logical. But then there is a Apple Car apparently driving the streets of San Fran. There are dozens of former automotive workers working at Apple. If this isn't made up, then apparently Apple is making something very car related.
The obvious rebuttal is that Apple also didn't have the skills to make a cell phone. But then it turned out that they could do it.
Now I'm with you on this that it doesn't make much sense. On the other hand the automotive industry, when you look at it, does seem ripe for disruption. It is scattered and complicated. It is filled with crappy customer buying experiences, and confusing product lines. The current automotive manufacturers seem like they are going to struggle in making the fairly inevitable switch to electric cars. Can the German or U.S. car manufacturers do the electronics that have become the backbone of the modern car? I doubt they are doing it well. (And my Mercedes has the electrical malfunction issues to back that statement up.) Can anyone in Germany do electronics anymore? I haven't bought a computer from them in a long time. Again the electronics in my Mercedes was kind of outdated looking when the car came out (and they came out with two more years of my car with the same GPS system. It was pathetic.)
Another thing to consider is the sheer mind boggling amount of money that Apple can throw at an issue now. They could spend a billion a month on car R&D and while that would shock Wall Street, it would be easily within their cash flow ability. I'm guessing that is more than the entire industry spends each month. It is certainly 100 times more than what Tesla can spend.
As for manufacturing and service, all that stuff gets outsourced. For the right price, any of current manufacturers will turn over an assembly line and start making Apple cars. Every dealer will want to sell them. Mechanics will learn to service them. None of this is insurmountable.
You point out that i3 is only good for local city driving. I don't know if you know this, but in the U.S. the majority of households have more than one car. The families with two cars is larger than those with one car. And the households with three or more cars is larger than those with no car.
There is totally room in many households for a small electric car for certain trips and a larger car for other trips. I'm not sure that this will become the norm. But I don't think it will be unusual for a family to buy two cars to cover two different use cases.
Congrats on the Tesla S. Sweet looking car!
Can't see what's your trying to say here. But yes, the previous reply is spot-on. Just because "Apple's scale" (whatever that means) doesn't mean it will be cheaper for customer's end.
Yes it may not be Model-S expensive, but most certainly it will be more expensive than typical cars from Honda, Ford or maybe even Lexus. Apple charges arms and legs for its Mac, iPhone and iPad despite being "assembled in China with massive scale" .. So yes, it will be very very expensive (again, compared to your average cars)
To me it makes sll the sense
Apple spent 3 billion on beats..
It takes aprox 1 billion to develope a new car.. With a another billion to tool it and take it to market !
Even if the car never makes it to market . What apple learns and discovers through the process ( which will trickle its way to other products ) will make it a worthwhile venture !
let alone if they trully creat something cool at the same time utilitarian and efficient !
Interesting article about cost of developing a new car ...
http://www.autoblog.com/2010/07/27/w...op-new-models/
They did that when they introduced the iPhone, and that change from being a computer maker seems to be working out pretty well.
Yes because the next model will be twice as powerful with a bigger battery, just as long as you like black or white
Maybe other companies will make skins to allow users to change the color when they want to.
Definitely the battery will get better almost every year until the tech settles in. That's what I worry about the most. Getting the battery to the right place is one of the top concerns for making electric cars widespread. Unless Apple sits back and waits until they can solve the problem, the first gen Apple Car will probably have half the range and twice the charge time as the third or fourth gen.
I'm going to get a deep ocean blue Incase Slider for my Apple Car
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Yeah, I definitely agree they need to fix what they've broken before moving on and I think they will steer things back in the right direction this year. If Apple employees even use their gear half as much as I do then they'll realize the buginessespecially in newer products like the 6 Plus which shouldn't even have these issues. But based on reports online it seems like only certain Apple products have more bugs than others. I know my iPhone 5 running the later iOS 8 betas and GM had very few issues.
I'm not sure if I quite agree that iOS is worse than Android, but I haven't used Android much in the last year. I think Yosemite is in better shape than iOS 8, however. But I also have a decently spec'd rMBP and an iMac at work so who knows. iOS 8 runs better on my iPad Air 2 but it also has twice as much RAM and no @3X downscaling like my 6 Plus.
My family is fairly young and small right now but I'm thinking about a strategy similar to this. My car is nearly old enough to go to war for its country and smoke and my wife's car is 10 years old but we bought them with cash a long time ago and they get us by. Allows us to save up a ton of money with no payments.
I'm thinking a small electric car for around town and then something like a Subaru Outback for longer trips on the highway (want a bigger car on the highway after several people I know getting run off the road by big-rigs over the past couple years) and also for winter AWD. Ideally I would buy a Tesla Model X if I had tons of money and combine the two together. But we would probably buy each car with mostly cash and stagger the purchases several years apart like the atypically financially savvy Americans that we are.