“To be sure, Apple could make a beautifully designed vehicle that handles well enough to make a car enthusiast’s heart skip a beat. The company’s head of design, Jony Ive, is a self-professed car lover, and he’s been responsible for the look and feel of Apple’s most iconic devices. Eddy Cue, Apple’s head of Internet software and services, is on the board of Ferrari, so he’s surely been thinking about the best way to integrate Apple software in a car,” Katie Benner opines for Bloomberg View. “But if Apple’s goal is to make an electric car that disrupts the auto industry like the iPhone disrupted smartphones, then the tech that matters the most is the battery. And car battery tech has thwarted many other companies. Building a better battery is a tough chemistry conundrum, not the sort of electronics problem that tech companies are used to solving.”
“The secret to an electric car that will take off with consumers is to make an affordable, long-lasting battery. The products currently on the market just don’t cut it, as evidenced by the small sales numbers for electric vehicles and by the fact that Tesla’s own battery sales have always been low,” Benner writes. “That brings me back to Apple. If it can’t solve the battery conundrum, it will likely make a luxury automobile that has a niche, rich audience. (Tesla hopes to sell 55,000 cars worldwide in 2015. By contrast General Motors sold more than 274,000 vehicles in the U.S. in December alone.) That’s not necessarily a bad thing. At the right price point, a car could help Apple maintain its status as a high-margin, super-profitable manufacturer.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Chemistry and physics have laws that can’t be broken regardless of the amount of blathering devoted to wishes, hopes, and dreams. What if the secret to the “Apple Car” isn’t the battery, but the fuel cell?
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