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Apple Car Challenges: Sobering Thoughts

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Re: Apple Car Challenges: Sobering Thoughts

#11
post #10

"Tesla takes 0.15% while losing about $4,000 per vehicle." Other sources claim that Tesla is making 25% profit per Model S, and similar for the Model X. Is this article cherry-picking numbers?

It's making the mistake of dividing their operating loss by number of cars sold and then concluding they're losing that much money for each car they sell.

Re: Apple Car Challenges: Sobering Thoughts

#12
post #9

Apple is a consumer electronics company. They build focused hardware with software that they patch over time. Cars don't work like that. Cars are like building 100 products into one thing. Fine tuning every aspect of there design is incredibly difficult and is reflected in cost. A software for cars is completely different. For Apple to completely commit to cars, the dynamic within its culture will have to radically c…

Wifi, two cameras one with a flash, finger-print, GPS, gyro, accelerometer, display, force-sensitive touch displays, sensors for display, cell-reception, in/out microphone ports, co-motion processor, bluetooth, speakers, etc etc. Not to mention a ton of software. Those are several products in one. Wether or not they actually build and design everything themselves is irrelevant. Not all car companies makes everything…

Vehicle engineering is on an entirely different scale to a mobile device. Imagine having to engineer all of that for one phone — and then as many times over as it takes to equal the volume of an average car — there you have your engineering challenge.

It's a massive undertaking. Musk was able to pull off Tesla because he saw a frontier that needed to be saturated, and has a history of trailblazing through new industries. It's not that Apple can't do it. They'll just have a hard time doing so.

Re: Apple Car Challenges: Sobering Thoughts

#13
post #7
post #5

I hate the term "range anxiety". The industry used to throw it around all the time. That term shifts the blame from the product to the customer. The issue is that a vehicle with a range under 100 miles is not that useful. I could drive a car like that to work most days, but I could not make a significant deviation - to go to another work facility, customer or supplier site, or even to see a friend for dinner after wo…

I live in a climate where you can potentially get stuck in the snow for few hours when going between cities (that happens maybe once per year, but today is exactly such a day, for example). In a gasoline car you would at least stay warm while waiting for the road to be unblocked. With an electric car, this might easily turn into a survival situation.

Being stuck in traffic barely drains the battery. It's range anxiety, not time anxiety.

Re: Apple Car Challenges: Sobering Thoughts

#14
post #13
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a climate where you can potentially get stuck in the snow for few hours when going between cities (that happens maybe once per year, but today is exactly such a day, for example). In a gasoline car you would at least stay warm while waiting for the road to be unblocked. With an electric car, this might easily turn into a survival situation.

Being stuck in traffic barely drains the battery. It's range anxiety, not time anxiety.

[deleted]

Re: Apple Car Challenges: Sobering Thoughts

#15
post #13
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a climate where you can potentially get stuck in the snow for few hours when going between cities (that happens maybe once per year, but today is exactly such a day, for example). In a gasoline car you would at least stay warm while waiting for the road to be unblocked. With an electric car, this might easily turn into a survival situation.

Being stuck in traffic barely drains the battery. It's range anxiety, not time anxiety.

What about running the heater to stay alive and defrosted?

Re: Apple Car Challenges: Sobering Thoughts

#16
post #9

Apple is a consumer electronics company. They build focused hardware with software that they patch over time. Cars don't work like that. Cars are like building 100 products into one thing. Fine tuning every aspect of there design is incredibly difficult and is reflected in cost. A software for cars is completely different. For Apple to completely commit to cars, the dynamic within its culture will have to radically c…

Wifi, two cameras one with a flash, finger-print, GPS, gyro, accelerometer, display, force-sensitive touch displays, sensors for display, cell-reception, in/out microphone ports, co-motion processor, bluetooth, speakers, etc etc. Not to mention a ton of software. Those are several products in one. Wether or not they actually build and design everything themselves is irrelevant. Not all car companies makes everything…

The complexity is still vastly different with cars than any electronic device Apple builds. All those individual items you list are likely in your future car if not already there buried among a hundred to thousand more such complex items.

While Apple may be supply chain wizards in electronics they would need to replicate it many times over to build cars and even then create a whole new distribution and support system.

I think their best bet is to be the smarts of all cars, why restrict themselves to just their own cars. Just launching one car would cost them a sizable chunk of their money trying to launch more than one would be many times more difficult, just ask Tesla. Tesla isn't out of the woods because unlike Apple they don't have the reserves to spend; assuming Apple stock holders would go along with the idea of spending tens of billions to start yet another car company.

No, I think Apple is better at being another supplier and getting everyone into their game. That gives them more flexibility and more penetration for a lot less. They are likely also the only company that could get their logos on the screens of all cars

Re: Apple Car Challenges: Sobering Thoughts

#17
At what point are companies going to give up on electric and look at other possible alternatives like hydro or something nobody has come up with like converting trash to renewable energy?

I still have issues with the environmental impact with electric fuel cell manufacturing and recycling. It's horrible on the environment and the recycling issues (hell, we still have problems just recycling plastics) cause me to doubt electric as a long-term viable solution.

Just in case:

http://www.theguardian.com/vital-signs/2015/jun/10/tesla-bat...

In a 2013 report, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Design for the Environment program concluded that batteries using nickel and cobalt, like lithium-ion batteries, have the “highest potential for environmental impacts”. It cited negative consequences like mining, global warming, environmental pollution and human health impacts.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es903729a

The main finding of this study is that the impact of a Li-ion battery used in BEVs for transport service is relatively small. In contrast, it is the operation phase that remains the dominant contributor to the environmental burden caused by transport service as long as the electricity for the BEV is not produced by renewable hydropower

Re: Apple Car Challenges: Sobering Thoughts

#18

Apple is a consumer electronics company. They build focused hardware with software that they patch over time. Cars don't work like that. Cars are like building 100 products into one thing. Fine tuning every aspect of there design is incredibly difficult and is reflected in cost. A software for cars is completely different. For Apple to completely commit to cars, the dynamic within its culture will have to radically c…

Reminds me of the classic quote by Palm CEO Ed Colligan from 2006.

    > PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.
Apple is by no means guaranteed success with a car, but I can't help but think they've thought through the company culture challenges. By hiring on so much new talent specific to building a car, they're hopefully changing the culture in the way they need to.

Re: Apple Car Challenges: Sobering Thoughts

#19
The big flaw with this article is that the reality is there really is only one great electric vehicle on the market, the model S. And the model S is a luxury car.

So, an interesting number would be the % of luxury car purchases that are electric over time. I would imagine this is probably trending up, and that's just due to a single model from a single manufacturer.

Re: Apple Car Challenges: Sobering Thoughts

#20

Apple is a consumer electronics company. They build focused hardware with software that they patch over time. Cars don't work like that. Cars are like building 100 products into one thing. Fine tuning every aspect of there design is incredibly difficult and is reflected in cost. A software for cars is completely different. For Apple to completely commit to cars, the dynamic within its culture will have to radically c…

Didn't the president of Nokia make a similar argument about computer companies entering the smartphone market? I'm not saying a car and a phone are the same, but it's a parallel to keep in mind when framing these arguments in your head.

EDIT: Found what I was thinking of. It was Ed Colligan, Ex-Palm CEO on 16 Nov 2006.

>>We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.

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