“As speculation grows that Apple may enter the electric vehicle market, Tesla Motors, which has done as much as any company to popularize the business, says it would gladly welcome the world’s best known technology company into the mix,” Chris Ciaccia reports for The Street. “‘As it relates to Apple potentially doing an electric vehicle, we’ve always said that our objective is to accelerate the transition to electric and renewable and sustainable energy,’ said Tesla’s communications chief, Ricardo Reyes, in an interview at Tesla’s Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters.”
“Apple’s entrance into the electric car market would stand as a stark contrast to the world’s major automakers, which have largely pushed off plans to aggressively produce and market a vehicle powered without the assistance of fossil fuels,” Ciaccia reports. “‘We need people that can do it with us to do this, and if OEM’s [traditional auto manufacturers] aren’t going to do it fast enough, then whoever steps up to the plate, it’s a good thing for us,’ Reyes said.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Wonder if they – or any other vehicle maker – would welcome an Apple Car powered by hydrogen fuel cells?
When Apple looks at what categories to enter, we ask these kinds of questions: What are the primary technologies behind this? What do we bring? Can we make a significant contribution to society with this? If we can’t, and if we can’t own the key technologies, we don’t do it. That philosophy comes directly from [Steve Jobs] and it still very much permeates the place. I hope that it always will. – Apple CEO Tim Cook, March 18, 2015
Related articles:
Apple Car: Forget ‘electric,’ think hydrogen fuel cells – February 20, 2015
Apple working with Intelligent Energy on fuel cell technology for mobile devices, sources say – July 14, 2014
North Carolina regulators approve Apple’s 4.8-megawatt fuel cell facility at Maiden data center – May 23, 2012
New aerial images of Apple’s planned NC fuel cell, solar farms published – April 7, 2012
Apple’s massive fuel cell energy project to be largest in the U.S. – April 4, 2012
Apple patent application reveals next-gen fuel cell powered Macs and iOS devices – December 22, 2011
Apple patent app details highly-advanced hydrogen fuel cells to power portable devices – October 20, 2011
“Welcome, Apple. Seriously.”
I was gonna say “Like Apple famously welcomed IBM making PC’s?”
D’OH!!
On April 30, Tesla is going to unveil its new home battery product line. At that point, they’ll welcome more consumers of electricity, even if it’s competing cars. Charge your home battery with solar during the day while you’re out driving your car, charge your car at night.
Obligatory political rant: The righties are going to hate this because it doesn’t line the pockets of their Arab oil cronies. This never would have happened if George W bin Laden Bush were still president.
The Nissan Leaf EV has an option that lets it plug in to your home to power it for up to 2 days in the event of a power outage. 25% of Leaf buyers get this option. Sounds like a smart idea.
The biggest problem I see with Apple making an electric car is that it would have terrible WiFi reception
Come on, now! That was pretty funny. You have to be able to make fun of Apple a bit.
I chuckled 🙂
Anyone interested in electric vehicles may want to read “The Great Race” by Levi Tillemann (2015, Simon & Schuster). It is a fairly in-depth and well-written book on the history of EVs and the key players and trends. Essentially, it appears that the future is in electric vehicles with batteries, not fuel cells. Fuel cells typically require fossil fuel as a root source of hydrogen, anyway. Sergio Marchione, head of Fiat-Chrysler, wants to see the environmental impact posed by fuel cells before throwing in with that technology. Pure EVs can be powered with renewables, particularly as solar and wind power technologies — and battery technology, too — become more efficient, affordable, and prevalent.
I don’t think you’re pointing out a legitimate difference between lithium batteries and hydrogen fuel cells.
Both need electricity to recharge. These days it’s most often fossil fuels charging both lithium batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. But electricity can come from many sources, including dams, solar panels, or nuclear plants. That’s an advantage both batteries and fuel cells have over gasoline, which always requires fossil fuel to recharge.
NASA uses hydrogen to fuel their rockets, and they burn fossil fuels to create their hydrogen supply. The actual hydrogen atoms comes from water, but it requires energy to extract hydrogen from water, and NASA burns fossil fuels to get that energy.
Obviously doesn’t do much immediate good for sustainability when you’re still using fossil fuels to charge your batteries or fuel cells – but it’s at least a move in the right direction because it enables sustainable energy to be used in the future.
The main difference between batteries and fuel cells, for sustainability, is that batteries can only recharge so many times before losing capacity and needing to be replaced, while a fuel cell can be refueled indefinitely without losing capacity – making fuel cells more sustainable in the long term.
Fuel cells degrade over time, as well. Proton exchange membranes age, trace contaminants build up, etc. depending on the particular fuel cell technology, they can last a while. But they would have to be refurbished at some point, just like an ICE or a battery pack.
But I agree wholeheartedly that the first big step is to transition to a system that supports renewables, even if it initially uses a significant proportion of fossil fuels as a feedstock. As you stated, that enables a smooth transition to renewables and incentivized their adoption on a large scale.
Electric in the form Tesla pushes is a pipe dream. Fuel cells offer an electric car that solves the same problems as petroleum based fuels. You ever get in the car, and realize you’re almost on empty? With electric you’re screwed, but with fuel cells you only need to go to the gas station. Only if that battery swap idea pans out will electric still have a chance.
[quote] You ever get in the car, and realize you’re almost on empty? With electric you’re screwed[/quote]
Well, you won’t do THAT again — or will you?
Niffy
The difference being that your home is also a fuel station. You don’t HAVE fuel anxiety. If you have a garage, you just plug in your car when you get home. Just like you plug in your phone before you go to bed.
You can run out of fuel in an ICE automobile and you can run out of charge in an electric automobile. You can avoid the situation in either type by paying attention. A fuel cell will not remove your head from your ass.
It’s a fair comment that battery-powered electric cars have a big drawback in that area. If it took literally *hours* to fill the tank on a gasoline-powered car, it would be fair to draw attention to that fact.
Batteries are going to be a huge problem for spontaneous people. They’re going to be impossible for colder climates and rural users.
Electric cars may not be the choice for everyone, but the fact is the average distance driven per day for cars in the US is under 50 miles. That means an EV with 80 mile batteries is going to be recharged at home overnight.
With modern chargers an EV battery pack can get to 80% charge in 30 minutes. Hours is a big boogey man that can happen, but not often. The colder and rural users with Teslas (200 mile range) are doing just fine. The information is everywhere, if you take the time to look. ICE talking points frequently don’t stand in the face of actual facts.
Running out of gas or charge doesn’t make one “spontaneous” or “cute”. I’d buy “silly”.
Sounds like a good electric car design for a 100-mile date!
I’d want to know her dad well enough to predict his reaction.
The free (for now) Supercharging stations that Tesla sprinkles across the country lets you get an additional 2 hours of driving after just 20 minutes. That’s a little longer than a rest stop that doesn’t involve a sit-down meal, but it’s not out of line either.
As long as there’s enough Superchargers available so you don’t find yourself lining up an hour to use it, of course.
Note, that’s 2 hours if you’re driving faster than the typical highway speed limit. Tesla claims the 20 minutes will recharge 50% of the battery, so you can probably extend it to 2.5 hours if you drive at the speed limit.
What alternate universe is Chris Ciaccia living in?
The major auto manufacturers to date have been the only parties to bring an EV to market at anything near the price of a traditional gasoline powered car.
With exception of Nissan and Mitsubishi, who are you talking about?
Those are 2 well known EVs and nearly every manufacturer is involved with some kind of EV or non-gasoline vehicle.
Chevy Spark EV is on sale
The Bolt is going into production
BMW i3
Fit EV
Literally every manufacturer is either in some kind of production or is in some kind of trial testing of EV and/or fuel cell vehicles so when I hear a guy say that the traditional manufacturers aren’t doing anything I have to shake my head.
The legacy auto industry had a fifteen year head start and chose to try to bury EVs. They are doing something, trying to regain relevancy. Their leaderships skill have been proven absent. Time for the Teslas and Apples to show them the way.
I’m all for the move to EVs but I won’t count out the existing industry. Not when they have been the only party to really deliver anything on a substantial scale.
Lead, follow or get out of the way. Personally, I consider GMs sale of the IP for large format NiMH batteries to Big Oil an attempt to block. That doesn’t show me much potential. It’s all about attitude and the legacy auto industry is being dragged into the future. Do you think Apple would be so successful if they didn’t really want to do what they do?
OBTW, this is management we’re talking about here. I absolutely believe the engineers and production people could do the job, given the resources and freedom.
I still don’t get all the hype about electric car.
Unless something fundamental happens in storing electricity electric cars will never be an attractive alternative to fossil fuel cars.
The recurring MDN take about a hydrogen fuel cell is where the future will be!
And have to go out to fill your car? No thanks. I’d rather just do that at home. Why should i have to fill up my tank at a station when I can just do it from the comfort of my own home.
Did you ever have a Gameboy? Do you remember having to go out and buy 4 AA batteries? Remember how much it sucked running out of power and having to go out and get new batteries? That’s what hydrogen fuel cells and ICE engines are. You have to go somewhere to fuel your car.
The reality is that most people just bought rechargeable batteries and recharged them. Even though there was an inconvenience factor and the batteries didn’t last as long as single-use batteries, they were a better choice than going out for electric fuel.
The same applies to electric cars. If you have a charging station at work and home, then you’re pretty much set. Sure, those in rural areas won’t want to go all electric, but they don’t have to. The vast majority of people live in cities these days. The vast majority will be fine with electric vehicles.
You’ll find you don’t need the extra range as much as you think and when you do, doesn’t the average American family have two cars anyhow? One gas, one electric. Problem solved.
In my humble estimation, a pure battery-powered vehicle will need to have a fully-loaded range of 250-300 miles, with a recharge rate that is minimally time intrusive and readily available.
Fully-loaded = headlights on, wipers on, HVAC and defroster on, entertainment/communications system on, ambient air temperature ~30°F.
That’s the benchmark, as I see it — achievable?
Give it a whirl, Apple — and Tesla — and Nissan and others. Reach out further than seems possible!
Niffy
Those numbers only apply if you have to charge at a fuel station. The whole point of EV is that you’re charging the car every day at home. The reason we’re so used to expecting 300 miles before we fill up is because stopping at a gas station every day just to get to work would suck. Car manufacturers could make HUGE tanks, but they’d have to make the car heavier, less efficient, and ensure its safety. They use massive tanks on RVs, for example.
However, if your houses ran on gas, maybe you’d have 3-4 gallon tanks and fill up your car nightly. Basically, the threshold for inconvience is once a week. The average person doesn’t want to go out and stop for fuel more than once a week, so tanks accomodate that. If people commuted from San Francisco to LA on some uber-fast highway that allowed cars to travel 200 mph, you’d see bigger fuel tanks.
With electric, the convenience factor is much more appealing. Plug it in when you get home.
When you need a long-distance car, either rent it (like you rent space on an airplane to travel far distances) or purchase a second car for that kind of travel.
Of course, my 250-300 mile loaded range guess would not apply to many urban drivers, who typically travel under 100 miles per day before returning to their home electric charging stations — you are quiet correct — but, it does not apply to the many of us who live in the more distant hinterlands, where traveling 150 miles round trip (or often more) is a regular event — lots of wide-open long-distances to cover as part of a necessary commute.
Get out there, sometime, and see for yourself — the U.S.A. has expansive spaces of significant travel distance between towns and cities — experience the immensity of it all!
Niffy
Yes, the U.S. is rather unusual in that regard. In the 15 years that I’ve lived outside the U.S. I’ve never once driven 250 miles in a day, while I can’t even count the number of times I did when in the U.S.
Yep. I know. And those places with wide open roads are actually where electric cars are least efficient. Start-stop driving is where electric cars excel. The open road is better suited for Diesels, diesel hybrids, etc. which are pretty energy efficient at highways speeds.
Expect an Apple buyout of Tesla, or at least a strategic partnership in the near-term.
I’m old enough to remember Apple welcoming IBM into the personal computer business. At the time, that didn’t work out so well for Apple. It would be interesting to see what happens to Tesla if Apple really did go into the electric vehicle market.
That said, Apple entering auto design seems like a perk to keep Jony Ive happen more than a practical product design situation. I’m still thinking all the auto stuff is Apple wanting to license auto-driving software to everyone.
If they though Carplay was their end game they would announce they were NOT working on a car. Nothing slows down inter-company cooperation like the threat of new competition.
The fact that they haven’t done that suggests they are seriously considering releasing a car.
Get your marshmallows and cooking sticks ready! Another toaster fire about to happen.