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
“will debut its first battery-electric model by 2025”
Is that when the rental agencies will fill their lots with electric cars I don’t want to drive?
Multi-billion dollar company realizes cars should probably have steering wheels. Welcome to 2022, here’s your complimentary aspirin.
I want a click wheel for steering or Apple can go to hell.
Wait a god damned minute is that Patrick “Playtime’s Over” George?? Hot damn!
Happy to be here, folks!
One of the worst trends in the automobile market has been putting all the controls and displays on displays. It sounds cool, looks futuristic, and is poorly suited to operating a car. I know what their “vision” is. A vehicle you summon to your home, get in, and it takes you to your destination without any input from you. All electric, of course. Let me inject a note of reality here. We don’t have the infrastructure to support a very large percentage of electric cars, period. Renewables will not generate enough electricity, period. And the environazis don’t want to hear about any other means of power generation. Then, whose software do you trust with running all these autonomous vehicles? It’s real human lives on the line. And, if nothing else, who has the legal responsibility when errors kill people?
Who decides where and when you can go wherever you want? Not you, surely. You are being controlled, friend. This is a dystopian vision of the future the way “they” want it to be. If you have no personal control over where and when you can go wherever you want, you are a vassal of the state.
Should Apple make cars? Hell no. They need to stick to what they do so well, with products that can’t kill or control you. Designing and building automobiles is hard, and important to our freedom of mobility. And Apple has just now realized that a steering wheel and pedals are needed? Yeah. I don’t want them anywhere near designing my car.
The reasons outlined in your rant is precisely why I personally will stick to custom built vehicles and/or 20th century cars from now on. I don’t need no damned government-mandated GPS blackbox, accelerate/brake/steer by wire, or self-driving. I want to be in complete control of the vehicle.
Ah yes, the Apple Car, or as we refer to it internally, “iCarly.” /pauses for brief audience chuckles/
With this project we’ve decided to look both to the future and to the past, for the technology and for the design. We’ve asked ourselves, time and time again, “what truly makes Apple, Apple?” The answer is both multi-faceted and simple at the same time. Breath-taking design and technologically wonderful, emotional; yet functional. /pauses for montage of images of past Apple products/
We want to bring CarPlay to back to it’s fundamental words, “Car” and “Play,” two words in conjunction that the competition in the market seems to have forgotten. We’re not doing this for the gimmicks, cheap laughs, memes, or our stock value; we’re doing this for you. /walks over to a large box covered in a black curtain and pulls off the curtain revealing a sporty, but friendly looking two-door shooting brake/ Introducing the Apple Empire.
The Apple Empire is the culmination of years of development and feedback from what our engineers and customers want. We’ll start with the basics of Empire, featuring all aluminum construction with a unique look featuring maximum amounts of practicality and “Play.” A single 400 horse power electric motor drives the rear wheels with a standard limited slip differential. It is powered by our unique H-patterned battery to free up room in the cabin for the 2+2 layout. The roof panel is Gorilla Glass available in 6 different tint colors: Black, Blue, Red, Pink, Green, and Silver. The smart-wool upholstered Recaro seats are designed to keep you comfortable and secure as you grab the Momo steering wheel when you’re piloting Empire down your favorite canyon roads. We’ve also worked with industry leaders Penske Racing to develop the adjustable 4-corner dual wishbone coil-over suspension and Brembo for the Carbon Ceramic brakes. Up front you have ample storage capacity for two carryon bags, and the rear cargo capacity is perfectly sized for the rest of your daily needs.
But iCarly will have only 80 miles of range for that $98k. The model with 300 miles of range and wireless charging will cost three hundred and seventy four thousand dollars. Also, the drive train will be capable of 215 miles an hour but the software just won’t take any advantage of it.
Where’s the formal intro, P. George?
I’d use the forbidden Apple powers to help make the brand less pretentious, with the hopes that it would trickle down to the end users’ attitudes.
tl;dr: I’d bankrupt Apple in a year
Now that Steve Jobs has passed away his cult will probably not insist Steve Jobs invented the car.
I assume an Apple car will use a proprietary plug for charging.
I spent 3-4 minutes logging in and navigating back to this page just to say WELCOME PATRICK GEORGE!
We all missed you.
Also, if it wasn’t already implied, first order of business is let’s get this “TTAC in 2006” commenting format revamped!
There are many dozens of former Oppos waiting in the wings to spend more time here, but this is a major hurdle after we were all spoiled (and then summarily discharged) by The Herb of Which We Do Not Speak.
I kind of feel like you’ve buried the lede in the byline.
Welcome aboard Mr. George.
Please don’t bring Brownell over here. That guy is insufferable
Yeah, while it’s nice in some ways to see familiar faces, part of the appeal of a new site should be some new voices too.
Yeah. I’m fully prepared to drop money on a membership tomorrow, but I worry that they’ll start attracting the bad from the old site too. I changed my bookmark the day DT and JT announced this site, and upvoted all the comments saying “Go get Mercedes”. As long as I start seeing articles about bicycles and politics or even worse, bad writers who argue with the readers in the comments (see above), then I’m happy for this to be my main car site that I check every day.
The Apple car, do what apple does. Meaning make a product that meets the needs of most of it’s customer base.
The no haggle thing is a blessing and a curse. If you like the price, great. Way overpriced, sucks to be you.
But no haggle means that you can just look at the vehicle, the price, and the competition’s vehicle and price. You’re not trying to decide whether Toyotas might have more wiggle room on their price than Hyundais. You’re not trying to search invoice prices and figure out which of those invoices includes larger dealer holdbacks.
You rarely haggle on a cell phone, refrigerator, or mattress. Just check the advertised prices and maybe wait for a sale. Sure, a car is a bigger purchase, but that just means the consumer is usually at a disadvantage. The salescritter sells a lot more cars than you buy, plus has a lot more pricing information than you do.
WOW, Didn’t even realize it!
Welcome aboard Patrick. Great to see you here!
The Autopian owners sure know how to pick great talent
The Autopian is becoming the nexus for former lighting site writers. The next thing you know Fancy Kristin will show up.
Sprinkle some conflict diamonds on the ground and one of her servants is bound to show up to collect them. Then you just have to follow him back to her compound – tricky because of all the secret yachts – with a cache of younger, more nubile servants and you’ve got her.
If you want to get Alanis King back it’s going to be easier, just get Criss Angel to hold a cat.
The Flush: Longform Edition
For a moment I wasn’t sure if I was still reading The Autopian or fell through a wormhole and ended up on Kotaku reading about the latest Mass Effect game.
I think the obvious answer is Apple buys Tesla. Elon Musk, cut off from his power source, will be pulled back into the Shadow Realm and seal the breach.
Alternatively, Apple could buy one of the Vaporware EV makers or one of the smaller ones that are delivering vehicles such as Rivian or Lucid.
Fully agree. Apple has so much cash on hand that buying an existing EV maker would be trivial. With the current leverage against Tesla due to Twitter, it might be a heck of a deal pretty soon. And two birds with one stone works well. Elon Musk for the Shadow Realm 2023!
Well, I’d create a faux car company and have Apple form an alliance with all funds going in the direction of my “car company” for research purposes.
Then I’d see if the crystal would allow me to shoot lightning bolts from my fingers. If not, I’d check out this “Shadow Realm”. They got a cool name, so it might be a good gig to hook up with them for a while. If nothing else, it would be more interesting than anything I’m doing now.
The strategy is to make a 4 door fastback sedan that’s not too big maybe 3 series size, with a design focused only on aero, no styling for the sake of styling. Apple products are about being appliances so the car would follow that theme. The interior would have no buttons or outlets just screens and smooth surfaces, and evoke an apple store.
Also PG on Autopian let’s do this shit.
I am perplexed by the dealers going the 25 EV annual allocation route. From the outside that seems like a worse financial decision than staying ICE/Hybrid only.
“Yes, we are an EV accredited Ford dealer. No, we can’t get you one, we ran out. We can service it through!”
Dealers in very rural, agricultural markets are probably quite a few years away from needing to cater to mainly EV marketplace. They’ll get there eventually, but Big Ranch Hand Ford in the middle of Montana probably can’t make a business case to drop 1.2 million on updating his dealership right now.
It might make sense for some low volume dealers who expect some demand for their EVs, but it does really seem like an edge case. I wouldn’t be surprised if the dealer where I went to HS went certified. They could probably sell a few each year, but not many. Pretty rural area.
I also wonder if the certified dealers are just figuring that they’re not going to sell many/any electric vehicles yet, but don’t want to be left behind as Ford pivots to more EVs, so they’re basically hedging.
It’s an expensive hedge. Pretty unlikely that they’ll see a clean pickup in costs to move from Certified to Certified Elite, particularly if it involves disruptions in service or sales while new equipment or utilities are brought in. If you spend a half mil now and a mil later when you find yourself outpaced, that’s not a great approach.
Small dealers in rural areas. For example, the dealer in Southey, SK. It’s got a Mach E on the lot, but it’s not in a position to spend $1.2 million on upgrades and their market isn’t going to buy 25 EVs a year. However, for the short term, they can start talking to their customers about EVs and ease them into the idea of buying them, they don’t have to send people looking at a Lightning into Regina and then once their market is willing they can do further upgrades to keep up.
*waves* Hello fellow Saskatchewanian. Same out here it my current neck of the woods in southeastern Alberta, they have a Mach E on the lot, but here in the land of daily driving your lifted emissions deleted one ton diesel, 25 EVs a year is plenty for now, anyone who wants one that bad can get one in Calgary when they go for the Costco run
Why is it every time I read Jim Farley, I picture Chris Farley?
Because of the family resemblance?
I can assure you Jim Farley does NOT live in a van down by the river.
Not that it is not mentioned by many EV naysayers already, but one of the old sites contributors made some observations about the Midwest seasons and actual truck capabilities and the lightning raised many red flags. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8gH52gKejE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nS0Fdayj8Y&t=4s
Admittedly Ford was not completely please with another black eye I suppose, but this does not bode well for those of us in the cold midwest climate zone.
I’d turn project Titan into a hyper-efficient, planned-obsolescence-resistant, easily-repairable, relatively uncomplicated car with actual controls and buttons for all of its functions, BUT allow the user to plug their i-phone into it and interface with everything inside the car if so desired. Why have a touch screen control the car when you carry one in your pocket? Having no smart phone means you can still use every function of the car via buttons. While you’re driving, the presence of actual buttons for everything would mean you never have to take your eyes off the road. This sort of dual functionality would actually be a case where a CANBUS system can be justified, IMO. And you could have the AI drive the car as well, if desired. An i-phone could even be set up to be used as a diagnostic tool for the vehicle, and over time, users could report all of the errors as they would on a computer OS, so that the app to troubleshoot any vehicle problems could be refined and perfected over time, even down to being able to tell if the hardware that allows detection of problems itself has a fault so that you don’t have to go over the entire car’s electrical system to find a fault when the code reader is in error.
The entire lineup of Apple cars could use standard off-the-shelf components and do so for decades of production. This would keep parts cheap and available long into the future. All of the electronics should be modular, with replacement parts 100% plug and play, no i-phone needed.
From an efficiency standpoint, maybe make the car resemble the GM Aero 2002 prototype, that had a 0.14 drag coefficient. This way, the base model could use a small 25 kWh battery pack and still get decent range, 150-200 miles, and it would keep the cost of entry down by reducing the battery pack cost.
Basically, I want to make it an ultra-slippery, highly efficient update of a Mercedes W123 that Apple products could interface with. A comfortable car with not a lot of features, but where the user has all kinds of methods to interface with the vehicle.
At the launch I want Tim Cook to come back from the shadow realm and sad wave a flag.
That’s the exact opposite of Apple’s hard-to-repair, capacitive-touch-everywhere, planned-obsolescence-innovator design ethos.
That’s the entire idea. ACTUAL innovation, and not marketing fluff. The consumer gets a product that constantly gets better over time, without even having to swap out any hardware, and the hardware that is inside the product remains useful and repairable, for decades after launch.
I hate landfill fodder. Apple’s products are currently that. If I ran the company, I’d throw the current paradigm out and build products to last, short-term profits be damned. Building cars that are deliberately designed to be future landfill fodder is extremely wasteful and stupid, IMO, and completely disrespectful to the buyer.
I’d also make the phones with everything user repairable and durable as well. None of this delicate touchscreen cracks if you look at it wrong BS we have today.
You’ll never make it at Apple.
Steve Jobs is spinning in his grave!
Just imagine if over time, every single issue that could go wrong with the car could have a video guide including step by step explanations, charts, and diagrams showing exactly how you can repair/resolve it, and have the car designed to be repairable with just basic tools and the iphone, so that if one chooses they can DIY everything on the car. You could have links to these videos accessible in all of the troubleshooting guides to repair it. Then someone won’t necessarily need to look for a mechanic, if they are shown exactly how to do it themselves and what can go wrong when doing the procedure so that they can avoid costly mistakes.
Make him spin in that grave more! So much that it drills a path to the Netherworld. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-haaaaa….
Baby Face George is back!!!! WELCOME!
First, I wouldn’t touch an Apple product. I would, though, own a Playstation vehickle 1st.
Second: When taking Stellantis, 14 kids isn’t all that surprising.
I don’t get why Apple can’t just do one giant clickwheel in the center of the dash and call it a day
I just picture my windshield suddenly turning grey with an Apple in the centre
Is there any chance we can get an insider look at Ford’s plan to create certified EV dealers, or does that break a whole bunch of NDAs?
most likely they are actually looking to cut dealers out of the equation altogether. of Course I suppose the GM dealers that are around will be able to fix and service Ford EV’s too. (like Tesla’s). Since Ford likes to build a set number of cars and call the sales “windfall” even though it is below market demand, I believe the ultimate goal is to order online and the basic certified dealers become glorified Carvana towers. With perhaps a way to dealer prep and service them(maybe).
Holy Shit Patrick George!