I remember the normal engineering mood inside Symbian, Motorola and Sony Ericsson when the iPhone launched.
We immediately knew we were toast. We used to say that the iphone made us irrelevant and android made us redundant.
We immediately knew we were toast. We used to say that the iphone made us irrelevant and android made us redundant.
BYD+CATL are the new iphone and other manufacturers are Symbian, Motorola and Sony Ericsson
VW, Toyota and friends cannot change fast enough. They should have started with big battery investments 10-15y ago and RnDing then, not now when Market is flooded.
Sure they are more nimble and have higher margins. But the products they make are still just copies of what those other dinosaurs are making. And for a car I'm still very reluctant to buy a Chinese one. Politics aside, what I'm buying is a 5-10 year long service experience where the Volvo dealer is 1km away and where the BYD service location is I'm honestly not sure. It might be around the corner too, but I don't know because it hasn't been there for 50 years yet. It's a much harder market to break into. The easiest way to do it is probably the way Geely and SAIC did it - Buy a brand and/or service network.
You can look at a BYD and a Nissan and make a decision based on minor trade-offs between different aspects of the car. You couldn't do the same between iPhone and a Sony Ericsson.
BYD car division has multiple departments doing independent R&D and releasing independent lines. They were first with 360° tank turn and now a jumping supercar. They are trying hard to deliver things others like Musk keep promising down the line.
A killer feature for a car would be FSD but that’s not an “iPhone” thing.
BYD and the other Chinese manage to sell good EVs for great prices but I don’t see them irreplaceable like the iPhone.
Maybe they are the new Toyota but not the iPhone.
Same goes with Tesla though it’s more complicated because Tesla keeps promising FSD.
The iPhone didn’t promise anything. It just delivered.
Anyone should be able to bring to mind giant marketing blitz for products that died horribly.
Model S launched 12 years ago. Apple replaced Nokia in 4 years. Model Y was the second best selling car worldwide, supposedly, after a Toyota and followed by a Toyota. Tesla has market share of about 2.3% globally and stays out of top 10.
iPhone became de facto definition of a phone. In less than 5 years from nothing. Tesla is... not that.
Apple launched in a market with comprehensive cellular coverage.
The charging stations grid is still being built out, so Tesla was in a completely different situation circa 2013.
Same just didn't happen with Tesla.
iPhone got all the press, all the attention, all the developers, and made all the money.
These companies do not have nearly the same value proposition relative their intended market as Apple did.
BYD or Tesla are still just cars. An iPhone completely changed what a "phone" was. And did so in a way that required the rest of the industry to take time to replicate.
BYD is more just Toyota. Which is awesome for BYD. I realize that a lot of people would like to be "just" Toyota in their market. But it's not the same as being Apple.
Tesla? Yeah, they're nothing like Apple. Maybe if they delivered on FSD? But even then, it's not like Apple. Apple made something that no one else was working on as more than maybe a research project. Tesla FSD development doesn't have the same advantage. Everyone is working on FSD. Since we're American, we're hoping Tesla, (or one of the big three), gets it first. But that's more of a hope, not necessarily the way things will pan out.
That's the essential difference between Tesla and Apple. Apple doesn't talk a big game. In fact, they famously and frustratingly say nothing at all. They just deliver. Tesla is still talking about FSD.
And in the FSD space I don’t think there is much first mover advantage anyway. The iPhone came out of left field. The path to FSD has been highly iterative with many steps taken by a bunch of different players.
Even if Tesla gets FSD first, it won’t be much longer before others get it to and they’ll all be roughly the same interface and feature set.
iPhone was significantly different than what was there before and as you or somebody said, nobody else was working on anything similar. It was a different business model—one that took away substantial power from the cell phone carriers and turned the phone into a software platform on par with a regular computer. It turned carriers into dumb pipes and they hated that!
FSD doesn’t really change the fundamental business model of any car manufacturers out there. It’s just another feature for the same familiar players to sell.
What would throw a wrench in the existing crop of manufacturers would be street legal FSD cars you could order on Amazon for a fraction of the cost or something. Ones made by the same crew that make all the other random flee market brands sold there. Or maybe if the whole market switched to on-demand pay per mile service with a completely vertically integrated company—but even then I don’t think that upsets the apple cart too much.
Tesla is run by a bigot, far right extremist. I would never send money to them, no matter their offerings.
Not so with Apple.
It not being mediocre is how it ate the world.
People will continue to buy brands they know and whose marketing aligns with how they see themselves. Not everyone will switch to BEVs for a variety of reasons - cost, lack of infrastructure, or hell, even contrarianism.
VW, Renault, Nissan, Stellantis, Toyota can change fast enough before BEVs are the only thing on the market. All of them already have models in various sizes (e.g. Renault make very good and adequate cheap EVs nobody else comes even close to in the big EU markets) and varying quality. It's easier for VW to improve their EVs than it is for Tesla to launder their image.
Or by buying a brand. Happens all the time. BYD already bought full control of the luxury brand Denza from the Mercedes-Benz joint venture.
A Rolls-Royce is a BMW, a Chrysler is a Fiat, an Aston Martin is a Ford, a Jaguar is a Tata, a Lamborghini is an Audi. And a Porsche is a Volkswagen.
For their EV, they have yet to make something that is competitive. Their EV is slow to charge, slow to accelerate, somewhat short in range, and quite expensive before they started adding—-in some cases five figure—-incentives to move them. It even had a recall for the wheels coming off.
The average consumer replaces their smartphone about every 3 years (at least in the western world, places like India are on an even shorter cycle). Additionally, the global average price of a smartphone is about 400 USD. That's a much faster moving market than cars and the investment is much lower.
BYD is very impressive, but I wouldn't look at the situation as the same.
Unless these two companies change the laws of physics in order to exponentially improve the overall performance of batteries (exponentially faster charging times, from hours to 5-10 minutes, exponentially cheaper batteries that would last longer) then, no, they won't be the next Apple. Just ask VW, they almost bet it all on EVs and now they're already with one foot in the grave because of that.
Not without some coercion. It was part of the settlement from when they cheated on emissions tests by running the engines more efficiently if the steering angle was touched or the non-drive wheels moved.
People from Future Crew (Finland) and Triton (Sweden) should have been running these teams. Half ;-).
You see this attitude a lot today. ("AI? LOL, it can't even count the letters in 'Strawberry.'") People have a mental block when it comes to understanding that the value of something new doesn't matter as much as its time derivative.
My memory is that Apple _charged_ developers to make apps :)
I remember a lot of delusion the first year that then turned into bitterness - but I don't have the inside perspective, just hints of it from my then position at a software supplier to both.
They were stuck in their post-Windows 95 world, and did not understand that multimedia CD-ROMs were clunky and dying.