As you likely recall and are possibly still shocked about, Apple has abandoned their decade-long project to develop and build an automobile. Yes, the company that gave the world the Apple /// and the Lisa won’t be giving us automated electric cars after all. However, thanks to a report in Bloomberg yesterday we have at least a little bit of an idea of what the secretive Apple car could have been like. In some ways, it’s not really that surprising, based on what their goals seemed to be, and the cars they seemed to be using for inspiration. It’s still an interesting thing to imagine, so imagine we did, with the help of some artificial imaginings as well, and made a little mock-up.
One of the first actual details we heard about the Apple car, way back in 2016, was about the one car Apple purchased for the project: an old Fiat Multipla.
I haven’t ever heard what the plans are for the Multipla now that the project is shuttered, but if it comes up for sale, it should be a great example of a 1957 Multipla that’s likely been sitting indoors for the better part of a decade.
The Multipla is a cleverly packaged, one-box design, and even way back then, I was speculating that Apple would take the same basic approach to maximizing interior volume, and with a suspected focus on automated driving, would likely have a room-on-wheels sort of interior:
The Apple car, with its very likely focus on autonomy, will have an interior that’s not the driver-focused two-rows of seats we’re used to. I think we’ll see a much more open and flexible interior space, an almost mobile-room motif.
Looking at the description of the car in the Bloomberg story, that’s what they were going for, and there’s another inspiration vehicle mentioned, and it’s also a one-box design, just even more famous:
The prototype, a white minivan with rounded sides, an all-glass roof, sliding doors and whitewall tires, was designed to comfortably seat four people and inspired by the classic flower-power Volkswagen microbus. The design was referred to within Apple, not always affectionately, as the Bread Loaf. The plan was for the vehicle to hit the market some five years later with a giant TV screen, a powerful audio system and windows that adjusted their own tint. The cabin would have club seating like a private plane, and passengers would be able to turn some of the seats into recliners and footrests.
I can’t say I’m surprised at all by the fact that a Volkswagen Microbus was an inspiration; it was the original room-on-wheels in many ways, and the simple, rational design had to appeal to a minimalist like Apple’s lead designer Jonathan Ive.
Also from the Bloomberg report:
Under Ive, the microbus design emerged. The interior would be covered in stainless steel, wood and white fabric. Ive wanted to sell the car only in white and in a single configuration so it would be instantly recognizable, like the original iPod he’d designed.
The idea that the Apple car would only come in white is an idea that very deeply, almost clinically Apple. It fits the pattern so well, and you can even imagine the hype that would come a few years later when Apple would announce that the Apple Car 2.0 would come in six carefully-curated colors. The detail about whitewall tires is interesting, and I have to wonder if that description refers to old-school whitewalls like I stuck on our mockup, at least in part for shits and, where applicable, giggles, or if it is referring to some sort of custom white-rubber tire, the likes of which we’ve all seen on concept cars before.
Interestingly, this general form is pretty close to hypothetical early-2000s iMac-inspired car that our own daydreaming designer came up with a while ago, as you can see above.
This iteration, known as the Bread Loaf, seems to have been the actual running prototype, but there were other, more radical ideas earlier. From the article:
It had become pod-shaped, with curved glass sides that doubled as gull-wing doors, and the company considered including ramps that would automatically fold out to make heavy cargo easier to load. The front and the back were identical, and the only windows were on the sides, a design choice with potentially dire consequences in the event that a human needed to do any driving. (Front and rear windows were later added.) Some people on the project called it the I-Beam.
A version with no front or rear windows gives a big hint at both what Apple was going for and why, I think, they ultimately failed. Apple seems to have been focused on the idea of a vehicle with Level 5 automation, which would mean something that can drive itself anywhere, anytime. This goalpost is a long, long way off, we’ve all come to realize, and making that your target is a terrible idea if you want to get anything actually to market.
That’s what defined the now almost cliché “living room on wheels” concept, where people could regain the time lost in travel to be, regrettably, more productive or something. Designs for Apple cars often didn’t include conventional driving controls, and the Bloomberg story notes that at least one prototype had something like “an Xbox controller” to handle manual control.
Apple was trying to make their first car while simultaneously trying to make the first-ever fully automated vehicle. It was too much all at once, and even though they were talking to partners as diverse as Mercedes-Benz, Canoo, and even McLaren, it’s still asking a hell of a lot to figure out all of these things at once, for their first automotive project. Apple had to start with the Apple II series and then the early 68000-based Macs and progress and learn step by step; they didn’t form in 1977, then toil in secret for 20 years straight and pop out an iPod. That’s not how it works.
The Apple prototype that was finished enough to at least drive around Apple CEO Tim Cook sounds like, from the article, an Apple-ized minivan, which, really, isn’t a bad start. It seems to have had some level of automated driving, but likely something that would have required constant human supervision, which would peg it at Level 2.
I would love to see actual pictures of what this thing looked like instead of these mostly AI-generated mockups I’m playing with here. We actually have someone on our team who was involved with the Apple car project, our suspension engineering guru Huibert Mees, but, of course, he’s NDA’d within an inch of his life so he can’t reveal anything, but he was able to tell me this:
“I worked on the Apple car for 3 1/2 years and I can honestly say it was the only time in my career I worked for years with absolutely nothing to show for it.”
I think that must sum up the feelings of many of the people on the Apple car team, because, of course, there was no product. But if there had been, it seems that it would have looked like a glossy, sleek minivan, only available in white.
It was to have an expensive optional rubbery plastic case to go around it in case it hit anything, to prevent damage in most incidents, but allow catastrophic breakage every now and then that would require buying a new one.
Mission creep.
Our car is going to have lasers! And an onboard fridge! And, and foot massagers! A movie theater! And a no girls allowed sign! Yeah!
Yip, G5 mobile phones have not transformed the world — not even sure if Apple has bothered with them — mine is reasonably recent and only has G4.
And G5 boosters said it would enable autonomous cars, no problem. (Also just need to touch the screen logistics and whole lot of other baloney).
Never mind they are already talking up G6…
So wait…making cars is HARD?!?!
Maybe now the VW ID-Buzz can take some inspiration and make itself a little more fun to look at.
I find the secrecy of Apple’s car/autonomy project interesting. Other autonomy projects were making magical predictions with crazy timelines,while Apple kept quiet and got on with it.
Was this wisdom on apple’s part? Did they realize right from the start how fiendishly difficult it would be? Or are they always secretive?
I almost want to give them credit for the former just on the basis of them NOT behaving like the others!
Apple has a very secretive product development culture. The iPod, iPhone, and most other Steve Jobs era products were developed in secret. Supposedly even other teams within the company knew very little, if anything. As Apple’s products became popular and product designs started to be leaked to the media, Steve Jobs was supremely bothered by the leaks. Leaking product info was a great way to get fired and sued.
So yes, Apple is always secretive, but this one was kept under wraps more successfully than some of their other new products.
Maybe they wanted to pull off the idea of their cars ‘talking’ to each other as part of automated driving, but figured out a really user-friendly but closed vehicle ecosystem with overpriced proprietary hardware that only a portion of the world will adopt won’t be as profitable as other parts of their business. /s
Darn, I wanted to argue with apple fans that steve jobs did not invent the car.
I know I’m in the minority of folks who enjoy driving, but all this fuss to get to level 5 autonomous driving? I think it’s silly. It’s like creating individualized public transportation devices. Just create an elevated lane and put the NPC folks up there in their pods for the commute. I’ll happily zoom around underneath while rowing my own gears.
If this is the design I’m actually disappointed that Apple dropped it. Maybe this would have sparked a new interest in minivans instead of those horrible car utility vehicles.
The light blue design with white-wall tires is incredibly ugly – about as bad as the Cyber Truck. It’s no wonder the engineers and designers kept quitting. Who would want to be professionally associated with that awful thing?
They COULD have made something incredibly beautiful, but they swung and missed, and fell down, then quit the game.