Ask HN: Why did Apple stop working on EVs?
Curious if anyone knows anything about the situation. The news articles on the topic suck. I'm assuming theres some sort of financial or technological reason that they stopped development.
On the other hand announcing an interest created buzz and perceived value in its stock. When the perceived value became realized value in the market, the C-suite got nice bonuses.
Now that the public has more realistic understanding of the engineering reality of self-driving cars, the new announcement will be perceived as creating future value. As the stock market converts that perception to reality, the C-suite will receive nice quarterly bonuses.
Or announced a moonshot in general?
Or to put it another way, my hypothesis is premised upon business executives acting in a manner consistent with making money and a C-suite of a large corporation focused on stock price as the most important part of their jobs. Not business principles espoused seventy years ago.
They were 6/7 years into the project before realizing that self-driving was a tougher nut than anyone had thought. And a couple more years ended in c-suite saying “prove to me this is with continued investment”
The closure of the project was a grim willingness to admit they couldn’t solve the problem. The fact that they spent so long on it is (I think more than anything) a sunk-cost fallacy.
Making cars is hard, the competition has been perfecting it for 100 years. But on the surface it seems easy or at least just as hard as making laptops or vacuum cleaners.
Newcomers are the least likely to nail production and final assembly line quality to actually get good cars out of the door. It was extremely painful and expensive for Tesla to achieve over a decade. (And their body geometry quality is still shoddy)
So when a consumer product maker announces they are going to start building cars it just doesn’t align too well with their core competencies.
Cars are hard and variable to assemble, bigger than a macbook or a dyson hoover.
and the auto maker supply chain is hard to navigate. The reality is many components are made by OEM’s and even Apple can’t exactly dominate every key auto supplier to nail their specific requirements. Dyson being smaller had no chance. So you need people on the assembly line and as Tesla learned that comes with calls for pesky Unions and such.
Then there’s the PR if your car does something bad like a battery pack setting on fire or something.
Likely Dyson ran out of will and money,
and Apple decided it wasn’t worth building up an entire company of designers, mechanical and electrical engineers, supply chain people, sales force, dealerships/ service centres / replacement parts centres etc. not to mention manufacturing engineers, operations engineers, factory space, factory plant equipment, and people to run it all.
Nobody buys that nonsense anymore. So what’s the point of entering a crowded market.
> It seems unlikely that such a capital intensive business would make sense long term.
People are only getting more expensive, and the tech is only getting cheaper.
But self driving cars are inevitable on some timeline. Their advantages over self-driving are simply too significant to ignore. And the space will be insanely valuable in the long run.
We've seen this pattern before. Video phones were predicted back in the 50s as being "any decade now but I would take 50 years or so to be "everywhere".
Some things are inherently fanciful (flying personal transport for all) because of physics, but there are no such limits with self-driving cars.