Loup Managing Partner and longtime Apple analyst Gene Munster puts the odds at 50/50 that the “Apple Car” will be on the market by 2026. It makes sense for Apple to make vehicles, Munster says.
Gene Munster and Rebecca Mulberg for Loup:
It’s been a long and winding road for Project Titan. The initiative is entering into its ninth year of development which is substantial when compared to iPad, the iPhone and the iPod, which took 6 years, 3 years and 1.5 years, respectively. If you’re curious, we believe an actual Apple television was in development for 6 years before the project was ended in 2015. That means Project Titan holds the title for the longest investment period of any Apple product to date, longer than the company’s anticipated MR headset which has been in development for about 6 years.
Does it make sense for Apple to make a car? The simple answer: Yes. The concept of the car is fundamentally changing. The car is no longer an engine on wheels but a computer on wheels. Tesla has proven the power of vertically-integrating software, hardware and services in auto—a playbook that Apple wrote for devices.
Another reason why Apple should make a car is that it will singlehandedly solve their growth challenge. In 2023, the company will hit $400B for revenue and, given the law of large numbers, it’ll be difficult to grow if the company pursues products geared toward mid-sized addressable markets. The auto market is massive enough to move up Apple’s growth rate. As a point of reference: Each year, there are about 75m cars sold globally. Applying a $32k average selling price suggests that the addressable market is about $2.5T. If Apple were to capture 2% of vehicle sales (1.5m cars) at an average price of $100k per car, that would add $150B a year in revenue. Assuming Apple’s core business grows at 5% over the next 7 years, and Apple sells 1.5m cars in 2030, Project Titan would account for 25% of Apple’s overall business in 2030.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s coming. The only question is when.
Apple is working on actual vehicles, not just some “vehicleOS” they’d license out to others (which was always a stupid proposition, as anyone who’s studied how Apple works for more than 3 minutes knows implicitly). — MacDailyNews, August 28, 2018
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Kind of like the unveiling of the B-21 Raider 🙏
Prior to the car release, I’d feel more settled if Apple could make the iOS cursor work properly. It seems precision in this process would be a prerequisite for the exacting requirements in a car?
Meanwhile, I’ll keep practicing to learn the idiosyncrasies regularly experienced in iOS.
I believe the cursor was “upgraded” about 6-ish yrs ago? I’ll get it by 2030…maybe.
Using the cursor on iPadOS with my magic keyboard is infuriating. God forbid you want to place the cursor precisely at the beginning, end or in the middle of a word to edit it. 99% of the time it will highlight the entire word, something I need to do less than 1% of the time.
To be truly disruptive, an AppleCar should be a fast-charging, electric vehicle with 600+ mile range.
AR/VR is about to Solve Tim’s car nightmare
Hearting the rumor of Apple NOT having fully autonomous, good idea! That tech is probably a decade out to work, work well, and not kill swaths of people in the computer taking a paper bag flying though the air, and thinking it’s a rock and throwing the car off a cliff to avoid it!…
Now, Apple’s had BMW, Porsche folks in and out, and all types working on handling and design characteristics. One can only hope for the following:
A Design that looks like it came from Apple and is “just right”
Massive iCloud/iPhone integration – seamless easy, w/powerful ease of use.
A Purple Cow (As Seth Godin would say).
A Purple cow was iPod, iPhone, the mouse and MacOS. If you see a field of cows and you see a purple cow in the field also – you’re gonna notice!
Right now, LUCID Motors has a purple cow in efficiency that dwarfs former leader Tesla. It’s just amazing how a 118kWh battery stack pulls off 516 miles of EPA range.
I once thought (many years ago) that would be Apple’s Purple Cow – delivering a vehicle in 2022 or earlier, that would simply have amazing range like no other.
Delays and delays and dithering abounding (this is Cooks fault for not being a visionary nor having a clear direction for the vehicle Jobs would have had), it languished and now the range and charging speed leapfrog tech is now past and fast becoming commonplace.
Autonomous driving? That’s not happening any time soon either.
So where is Apple’s advantage? What’s the leapfrog? What’s the gotta have it? What’s the Purple Cow?
It is now very difficult to say. Apple is becoming so late to market, it is increasingly entering the “me too!” category.
iCloud integration will be great, or it had better be great. From opening when approaching the car, setting your seats, your preferred heating or cooling settings, mirrors, podcast or music prefs and vehicle prefs, everyone is going to expect this…
And while these features, a sleek design, solid range, will all be “nice” what is the Purple Cow?
The ONLY tech I can think of that can leapfrog folks until fully autonomous shows up, is Augmented Reality. If most of the windshield is a type of augmented glass, Apple has something.
Now, this would take an amazing driver eye-tracking solution that has video-game-like undetectable latency. Tracking the human eyes and where they are, if overlaying a road on a black, foggy, dark of night, where that driver’s eyes are is going to be absolutely KEY! If it doesn’t work amazingly well, and the driver’s head is off the the left but the AR Glass didn’t adjust the road, well then, we are going to have a lot of people driving off cliffs again.
An amazingly integrated AR tech in the windshield would be the Purple Cow.
Alas, with Apple so obsessed in being the winner of fully autonomous, I highly doubt much time and effort has been given to this – and that’s a problem. It’s a problem in vision of a product, and a problem in leadership.
Bobby: nicely expressed!
I have a hunch that Apple was also having difficulties finding someone willing to take on the manufacturing side of this product. I am hopeful that the fact that Foxconn is dipping their toes into EV manufacturing ie. Lordstown Motors, that they have come on board and are getting up to speed to produce AppleCar?
The Apple addressable automobile market is not the size given in the article. Apple will make an electric computer on wheels, while most of the market is for internal combustion engine automobiles. Tesla owns the electric market now. The number of people who want an electric car priced above $100k is tiny. And Apple has shown zero understanding of the market or any sort of executive expertise and competitive advantage this far. So far they have shown massive ignorance of the market and have wasted huge amounts of money while not retaining any serious top level managers.