Good morning. Today we are discussing hopes and dreams, and nothing embodies those fleeting things more than Apple’s attempt at making a vehicle. We’re also discussing how Ford is trying to get its dealers in line to sell EVs, the state of things at Stellantis, and so much more. Join me for a journey neither of us will ever forget.
Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.
Apple’s Project Titan Hits A Speed Bump, Again
Over the past few years, few endeavors in the automotive world have been as intriguing and elusive as Project Titan, Apple’s long-running and long-troubled attempt at making a car. What kind of car, you ask? Friend, that’s the problem. For a while now, no one at Apple has been quite able to agree on what the vehicle should even be. It’ll be electric; that’s the easy part. But should it be a consumer-focused car, like most of Apple’s products? Should it be a robo-taxi? Should it be some combination of the two? And most recently, word on the street was that the vehicle wouldn’t have a steering wheel or pedals at all—making it, presumably, almost entirely reliant on AI for driving.
Well, that idea just whiffed out the window, according to a scoop from Bloomberg, which says the car’s release has been pushed back one year to 2026. Also, forget not having a steering wheel. The new design will be “less ambitious” and should enjoy conventional controls. From the story:
The latest changes underscore the challenge Apple faces in pushing into an entirely new product category and taking on technological obstacles that have bedeviled some of the world’s biggest companies. The secretive project, underway for years, is meant to provide Apple with another major moneymaker, but it also could test the limits of the iPhone maker’s capabilities.
Apple currently plans to develop a vehicle that lets drivers conduct other tasks — say, watch a movie or play a game — on a freeway and be alerted with ample time to switch over to manual control if they reach city streets or encounter inclement weather. The company has discussed launching the feature in North America initially and then improving and expanding it over time.
The story also has a detail I hadn’t seen before, which is that Apple was targeting a price of around $120,000, but now it’s shooting for under $100,000. In other words, the current vision is a passenger luxury car possibly aimed at the Tesla Model S or X, or something from Mercedes.
The above situation, however, is reflective of how automakers and tech companies alike (increasingly, they are the same thing) are reckoning with the failed promise of autonomous driving. Remember how the computers were all supposed to take our keys by, like, 2019? Yeah, AI is nowhere near good enough for that yet, and it probably won’t be for decades.
But a better question, for now, is why Apple is even bothering with the incredibly complex, heavily regulated, internationally byzantine automotive market instead of just putting more of its technology into existing companies’ cars, as it does with CarPlay. I’ve yet to figure that one out.
Ford To Dealers: Drop Your Opposition To EVs
Interestingly, the majority of dealers — about 1,650 — chose the “Certified Elite” program, which requires investments of up to $1.2 million. Another 261 dealers chose the lesser “Certified” status, which means investments of up to $500,000.
But that latter designation also means these Ford dealers will only be authorized to sell 25 EVs per year; the “Elite” dealers will be allocated far more EVs. If the dealers don’t commit to anything? They’ll only be selling gasoline and hybrid cars, Ford executives have said, putting them potentially very behind the curve as the automaker plans big EV rollouts in the coming years.
Stellantis Is Feeding Its 14 Kids Just Fine, Thank You
This approach has breathed new life into brands such as Chrysler, which has been trudging along with a shallow product lineup in the U.S. and appeared to be in need of direction before the merger.
$100 Billion For America’s EV Battery Industry
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 passed by Congress could even the playing field between the U.S. and China on the EV battery development front, said Austin Devaney, chief commercial officer of Piedmont, North Carolina-based Piedmont Lithium during Monday’s Automotive News Congress in Detroit.
The legislation provides a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles that uses battery materials domestically extracted or processed.
A BMW-specific supplier alone, for example, is planning an $810 million battery plant in South Carolina. This is about to become a huge American industry, and it’s going to be fascinating to see where it goes in the coming years.
The Flush
You’re hiking in the woods on a quiet Saturday morning after a demanding week at work. Suddenly, the ground starts shaking—an earthquake, and a violent one at that. As you lose your footing, you see a silver-haired man run up the hill behind you. He’s out of breath, but even that can’t mask the panic in his voice, and when you gaze at the mountain off in the distance you begin to understand why.
“My God, I’m too late,” the man says as red lightning bolts erupt from inside the mountain and fire into the sky. You ponder the impossibility of this sight even as you realize the man next to you is Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple.
“The Shadow Realm!” he screams, grabbing you by your Patagonia jacket. “I was too late! The seal is already broken. They’ll be here soon, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop them.” Before you can ask questions, the ground itself splits open. Tim Cook falls into the crevice. You grab his arm and try to pull him back from certain death, but he’s already slipping away from you.
“It’s fine!” the dangling Tim Cook screams, reaching into his pants pocket and pulling out a glowing crystal, which he gives to you with his free hand. “You have to carry on the work I started. You must use my powers to hold back the Shadow Realm. Also, you are now the CEO of Apple.”
“Guh?” you say, utterly baffled by this conversation, such as it is.
“The two situations are not related,” Cook tells you. “Just go with it. But you do need to figure out a car strategy for Apple.”
“I don’t understand,” you beg of Cook as he slips from your grasp. “Why does Apple even need to make a car? Why are you getting into that business at all?” But it’s to no avail; Cook falls into the abyss and you are left alone.
The crystal glows in your palm, telling you—almost instinctively, speaking to you inside your mind—what must be done. You must defeat the Shadow Realm. Also, you need to figure out what to do with Apple’s Project Titan.
(The two situations are not related.)
Reader: What do you do?
Photos: Apple, Ford, Stellantis, BMW
Regarding the two unrelated challenges foisted on me by Tim Cook: First, I’d partner with an Asian brand with no presence in the US, like Proton or BYD, to design an electric car with the clean design and and user interface we’ve come to expect from Apple. That’s it.
Then I’d value that partnership at eleventy billion dollars and offer Apple’s stake in it as tribute to the Shadow Realm to leave us alone. It’s the Shadow Realm’s problem now.
Stellantis needs more brands imho. Instead of making stupid new ones (DS anyone?) they could just bring back some of the dormant ones that they already own: O.M., Bedford, Panhard, De Soto. I can’t imagine how many brands are in there altogether. Just let Plymouth stay dead, please.
“Does anyone really enjoy the back-and-forth that happens with a car dealer as they both fight over a fair price?”
No… but if I have to pick between having no choice but to pay an unnecessarily elevated price and haggling, I’ll suck it up and haggle every time.
Various thoughts.
Yep,the apple car will be (almost) a non event.Take away autonomy and you have another EV. Even then it’s doubtful to sell well.In the past it made sense to launch an expensive model first but not so much now.It’s a crowded market !
I kind of like stellantis’ varied range.In theory it’s better than the VW model where the same car is tarted up in various clothes.
If only stellantis would dump it’s losing models, it could be great.Well semi-great i guess
The USA subsidizing home made batteries is a good strategy.Not from a cost perspective but as insurance against china’s inevitable future nastiness.
For the same reason,but much more important ,are chip fabs.It’s extremely important america goes ahead with it’s plans to shift fabs from taiwan.
This wont stop the USAs inevitable decline but any slowing is a good thing
Apple has developed a full digital dashboard and has not been successful to date in convincing OEM’s to adopt it as standard equipment.
Today, Lucid Motors’s market cap is $14.5 billion. It has fallen 82% this year. No one has a more advanced (and compact; you can carry it a suitcase) electric drive system. I have felt for a long time that Apple should acquire Lucid to showcase their digital dashboard and infotainment. The Apple customer base speaks for itself.
Lucid is a premium product (as is Apple). Their primary weaknesses have been with supply chain and production which has not allowed them to ramp. At their present production rate they have a five year backlog. The Street smells blood and is losing patience. This is Tim Cook’s strength. Innovation is not (his strength). He is no Steve Jobs. This seems like a natural alliance. The acquisition cost for Apple would be approximately 7% of their cash reserves or slightly more than rounding error.
Under Tim Cook’s direction this project is going nowhere. They have already lost billions and probably a decade of no value-added R&D, other than the digital dashboard referenced above.
My main reason for hoping Apple doesn’t build a car is that I don’t want to hear car alarms going off in the middle of the night waking us up to tell us some kid has wandered off 500km away and expecting us to get up and look for them.
I enjoy your comments and have no reason to dispute what you’re saying (sans a healthy layer of snark for style points). I found your penultimate paragraph strangely reminiscent of what the telecom industry said in response to rumors of the first Apple phone circa 2006. Remember this quote from Palm’s CEO?
“And so I just would caution people that think they’re going to walk in here and just do these. We’ve struggled for a few years here, figuring out how to make a decent phone. The PC guys are not going to just, you know, knock this out. I guarantee it. So, look, welcome, let’s go for it. We can’t stop all that. It’s going to happen, but it’s going to be, I don’t think it’ll be so easy for everybody, as everybody thinks to enter it. It’s a tough space.”
Stop trying to make the Apple Car happen. Make me an iPhone that actually fits in my tiny hands first, you cowards. The current iPhone Mini is…not mini. To put this in car terms, I need a reasonably sized Cooper (except, like…a phone) and you high-tech fartwaffles whipped out a lumpy, sad Countryman.
Also, how dare you besmirch the good name of the Manta’s maker.
I don’t want a smaller phone, I want longer thumbs. Fix my thumbs, Apple. Why haven’t you fixed my thumbs?
My thumbs are of adequate size! I’m okay with my thumbs! It’s my gottdang phone that’s gotta change!
Give Halftrack bigger thumbs, though. That’d be funny.
My thoughts on autonomous cars – ideally, we just want to get in, and have it go from A to B without us doing anything, right? I’m thinking like an elevator, they are generally trusted to just go back and forth moving people without much guidance. Now I think it could happen, but well after ICE vehicles are off the road and considered museum curiosities. And all the car manufacturers will do something smart for once, and actually agree on a single standard for charging, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and road monitoring. (Think if the assisted driving/super cruise systems and mapping from Tesla, GM, Ford, etc were combined today in 1 shared system, I’d think even that could be an improvement over what they are doing on their own today.) So I’d guess we wouldn’t see anything like this actually happen for another 40-60 years?
Regarding the Apple car… I think most people would want a vehicle that has autonomous capability, but then also gives you the option to take manual control.
I know that’s what I would want.
Regarding the flush and Apple’s car strategy – focus on making a great BEV first… one with a steering wheel and brake/throttle pedals. And the vehicle I’d start with would be a van that is sold in consumer-focused passenger versions and commercial/cargo versions. And I’d do that because nobody is offering an electric passenger van yet.
And for the autonomous software… treat it as a separate product completely… but with an eye on commercial as well as consumer use. One day when the software is done, either build a product and/or partner with an existing commercial vehicle maker (particularly for things like transit buss or trains).
Clicked on The Verge link before reading the byline. Thought “why the hell is Matt taking credit for Patrick’s work?!?”
I assume that GAS is one of the ~1200 elite Ford EV dealers? Hopefully that $1.2M cost doesn’t eat too much of The Autopian budget. P.G.’s salary and bail money can’t be cheap!
Future podcast subject: what does Beau think about the no-haggle pricing?
The answer is clear. I would seek a team; an eclectic team, unconventional to be sure. At least one teenager, someone experiencing a coming-of-age; an older mentor with untold wisdom but still able to learn about himself; a turncoat from the enemy itself, someone with vast experience but still trying to forge their own identity; an aloof, aristocratic warrior that will, over time, be more and more humanized, until they’re just another part of the team. All of that is at a minimum, with room for up to, but no more than, three more members. 4-5 is that sweet spot. I will then set them to the task at hand and rely on their expertise, be patient through their inevitable shortfalls, and await their eventual triumph.
I would deal with the Shadow Realm in a similar fashion.
Yeah, that’s just fucking great: let’s design a car around a technology like autonomous driving that isn’t going to be safe for deployment for thirty years or so. Assholes.
Has the Apple brain trust really become so desperate for ways to deploy its $50B in cash that it’s considering getting into vehicle manufacturing? Seriously?
If this is more than just a play to design/market consumer electronics or components to be supplied to the upcoming wave of EVs, I just can’t see it making sense. Apple loves its high profit margins and quick product turnover, does it really want to wrap up billions in fixed assets in one of the globe’s most competitive industries? Does it really want to build out a retail/service network and extensive relationships with suppliers? Does it want to be accountable to customers and regulators for the continued safety, warranty and service of these complicated vehicles for a minimum of a decade?
It just doesn’t fit into their modus operandi or business expertise. They produce flashy, easy to use consumer electronics, and leverage their popularity and brand power to extract usury fees from their App store. That’s it. They are ill suited to enter the world of complex manufacturing, regulation and service obligations that accompanies automobile manufacturing. Especially considering that the global auto market is arguably oversaturated as it is, and every serious legacy manufacturer is entering the EV space with a flood of offerings.
Maybe I’m just not enlightened enough or underestimate them, I dunno. Just doesn’t seem like a good fit and reeks of Silicon Valley “disruptor” hubris that will do little more than set a massive pile of cash on fire.
CarPlay is the maximum amount of Apple I want in my car.
I do not want:
-A car that suddenly changes all the interfaces after a software update.
-A car that reboots unexpectedly.
-A car whose range suddenly drops from 100 miles to 0.
-A car that has anything to do with iTunes.
-A car that reduces the performance as it ages, regardless of battery health.
-A car where some features no longer work after the software can’t be updated.
-A car that insists on having it’s own style of fragile charge connector.
-A car that won’t turn on, or the key suddenly stops working.
-A car that turns its full battery range into heat for no good reason so it’s dead right when you need to drive it.
-A car that becomes so frustrating to use that you end up replacing it with a new one that is fancier but worse.
Did I miss anything?
A car that tracks your every movement whether you tell it to stop or not, as it send all your info to targeted ad servers
Ooh I forgot about the planned obsolescence. Fun. I almost commented on the terrible battery estimation but didn’t know if it was still an issue.
A car that decides you now need to sign up for an Apple account to turn it on.
I would continue the trend of being one of the most anti-consumer companies imaginable and probably build a 2013 Model S extremely cheaply, pretend it’s incredibly innovative, and sell it at an insane profit margin.
Oh, I would also make every bolt a different nonstandard size and have it brick itself if not serviced by an authorized retailer. Of course things like a windshield replacement from a dealer would cost roughly 80% of the cost of a new car.
And then give it an unnecessary amount of RAM for some reason.
Almost forgot- things like the charger would be proprietary AND not included AND cost insane amounts of money.
It would hopefully perplex the shadow realm demons enough to send them back to whence they came.
The whole business of “no haggle” pricing becomes somewhat irrelevant in states like mine where sales tax on a vehicle purchase is based on the net price after trade-in allowance. While the new car’s price may be fixed, there can be thousands of dollars of wiggle room in trade-in valuation.
Bottom line is that the bottom line remains negotiable and competitive between dealers.
Torch and DT are getting the band back together. AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
For real! I had to scroll up to to see who wrote it and was pleasantly surprised to see Patrick’s byline! Last I heard he was working for The Drive, but I guess that’s old news?
I know Kristin is still over there, and would like to see her back under the tent of weirdos as well.