Can Apple Disrupt The Auto Industry?

Mr_Man

Folks,

thought you might find this article on how Apple could disrupt the car industry, including Tesla interesting.

Enjoy.

serfboard

Can Apple distrupt the auto industry? No.

With regard to electric vehicles, Tesla is already disrupting the auto industry, and the industry is responding - almost every manufacturer has already produced electric cars (with the obvious exception of Toyota who are going to), and, battery-production aside, they have the ability to massively upscale should the market require it.

Eventually, Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEVs) will provide Transport-As-A-Service (TaaS), and here I think that GM have the right strategy - they have invested half a billion dollars in the ride-sharing service Lyft, and together they plan to test self-driving Chevrolet Bolts. The future is here already (albeit in test format).

The article you quote is wrong in all sorts of ways, but I'll take just one point:

there should be very little doubt that Apple will get into autonomous car manufacturing. The reasons are as follows:

Firstly, Apple is a product company and not an IP or components company. Selling autonomous car software to other companies as an end goal is simply not Apple’s DNA.

However, it makes no sense in a TaaS environment for Apple to get into manufacturing when most people will not be buying products anyway. Autonomous cars, buses and trains will take us where we need to go, except possibly in rural areas where people may still need to own a car due to lower availability of service or premium pricing.

Eventually when we want to get from A to B, an app will offer us all sorts of options - from walking, to hired bikes, to hired private transport, to shared public transport and a combination of all of the above - with the tradeoffs being time, comfort and price, and we will pick from a menu of options. The TFI journey planner app alreadys offers a limited form of this.

It's useful to have Apple in the field if only to provide a warning to car manufacturers - I'm sure none of them will want to be the next Nokia. However, Google has already disrupted the market with autonomous cars, and the industry has gotten the lesson.

BoatMad

Apple has recently changed tack on EVs. It has transferred many engineers out of the car division and has seemingly backtracked on plans to build any sort of car hardware.

https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2016-10-17/how-apple-scaled-back-its-titanic-plan-to-take-on-detroit

As for Google , it's repeatedly fails to deliver on R&D projects and often walks away. It's Pages and Brinn plaything

Of course no women will get into a Uber autonomous car !!!

I predict we are decades away from real self driving cars sharing uncontrolled road space with humans

It's the year of Linux on the Desktop any year soon too !

unkel

Apple spending a few actual dollars on R&D? Wow, that's a first. I guess I can't help it, maybe my age but like BoatMad I can't see any transition to shared autonomous driving happening any time soon.

colm_mcm