Apple approached Japan’s Nissan in recent months about an assembly deal for its secretive “Project Titan” autonomous car endeavor, but talks are no longer active, Financial Times reports, citing “people briefed on the matter.”
Kana Inagaki, Peter Campbell, and Patrick McGee for Financial Times:
The contact was brief and the discussions did not advance to senior management levels following divisions over branding for the iPhone maker’s electric vehicles, the people added.
Apple also recently halted talks with South Korea’s Hyundai Motor and its affiliate Kia, underscoring the challenges of finding an automotive partner for its car efforts, known as Project Titan.
But one person with knowledge of the discussions said talks faltered after the US company asked that Nissan make Apple-branded cars, a demand that would effectively downgrade the automaker to a hardware supplier.
Many carmakers have expressed a fear of becoming “the Foxconn of the auto industry”, a reference to the Taiwanese manufacturing group that assembles iPhones…
Mio Kato, an analyst who writes on the Smartkarma platform, said Nissan lacked the scale of rivals such as Toyota to make the type of large investments required for autonomous driving technology.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ll eventually see which assembler is the smartest. When Apple disrupts the automotive industry, would you rather be working with them or be steamrolled by them?
Apple Carplay is the only thing I don’t like about my Kia. So I’m totally not clear on what exactly Apple is bringing to the table. A car just seems too far from things that Apple does well. (I still want that camcorder.)
How much did AT&T benefit from being the first with an iPhone?
Good! Nissan is junk. Crappy CVTs, what is not a frontier Titan or Armada is disposable, worst paint jobs of any brand where the clear coat becomes cancerous in just a few years of southern sun.
I doubt that Nissan ever had word one with Apple, and I still don’t think any car maker will ever align with Apple to build a “car” ever. The constant speculation is merely going to make other car makers shy away from probably considering working with Apple in the first place.. IMHO..
AT&T probably benefited a lot for their initial interaction with Apple on the iPhone. Car Play is great, if you don’t like it, you’d probably hate Android Auto…