Xu Jialu

Mar 31, 2024

The Apple Car is dead. Long live the Apple Car.

I believe I've said this before, but I hate concept cars. 

It's part of the reason why I've created this safe place for my rants. If these brands are so sure of their "vision of the future", why not just make it? Why not just sell it? And if the idea wasn't feasible in the first place, why show it?

>:(

The Apple Car is no more.

After 10 tumultuous years, Apple's Project Titan has come to an end. Again. 

In 2014, Apple began work on a top-secret automotive project that had one goal in mind: to create a fully autonomous passenger vehicle. Rumours about the "Apple Car" have swirled incessantly since then. The Apple Car was to have no driver seat, and no steering wheel. It was to be a luxury vehicle along the form factor of a Canoo vehicle, one of the many startups named in acquisition talks. Over the next 10 years, Apple explored partnership options, as it slowly realised just how difficult the automotive industry is. Bigger and bigger names came and went. Mercedes-Benz. BYD Auto. Tesla. BMW. Nissan. Volkswagen. Das, Auto.

Sorry, the last bit was a "Hotel? Trivago" moment.

I was convinced Canoo was Apple's best choice. Because, well, look at it. That's an Apple Car.

A month ago, Apple dissolved the thousand-strong Project Titan team, retrenched some of the employees and shifted most to their artificial intelligence departments. And with that, the Apple Car is dead. Rumoured to have cost Apple over a billion dollars per year, Project Titan ended not with a bang, but more of a whimper, as Apple discovered, rather forlornly, that the automotive industry is brutally rigid, and savagely unforgiving.

Meanwhile, across the world...

In 2019, Tesla broke ground, both figuratively and literally in Shanghai, China with Gigafactory Shanghai. The move was unprecedented -- this was the first time in history an automotive manufacturing plant was owned wholly by a foreign corporate entity in China, and not at least as a joint venture with Chinese companies. The first Model 3 rolled off the assembly line less than a year after the construction of the factory. This is unheard of in the industry. 

In September of 2023, Gigafactory Shanghai saw its 2-millionth EV roll off the line.

To Musk, Gigafactory Shanghai was a lifeline for Tesla and accelerated its charge (:D) towards becoming one of the most influential EV brands after years of capturing just the niche market. We see the effects of it in Singapore, too. All Model 3s and Ys we see in SG are made in Shanghai. Tesla massively cut both post-manufacturing transportation costs to sell in the region and the price of raw materials, given China has almost an abundance of lithium in its land. 

China, on the other hand, had other plans. It was never this nice to foreign companies, let alone an American one, so what gives?

鲶鱼效应, or the "Catfish Effect"

Imagine this: You've got a few fish in a pond. They laze around, enjoying food in abundance, and after a while, they get fat and slow. Good for a stew, not so good if you want active-looking koi. So what do you do? 

Throw in a highly competitive, lightly psychopathic catfish to muddle up the waters and smack the koi in the heads. And let the inevitable chaos and competition create the best koi the pond has ever seen. Maybe even the best koi of most ponds.

This picture is very off-brand but it is also funny as hell. And the bit always comes first.

That's the Chinese saying of 鲶鱼效应, and we have seen it in great effect over the last 5 years since the first Model 3 rolled off the line and practically took over the Chinese EV market. Traditional Chinese brands got whooped in the ass so hard and so brutally by Tesla and its $250,000 RMB (about SGD 50,000) Model 3 that they were forced to adapt, or die trying. The government waived the Chinese equivalent of COE (which had cost up to about SGD 20,000 then) for all-electric vehicles, which gave the catfish in question a literal steroid shot. Go crazy.

In the years that followed, China's EV market went bonkers. From 2019 to 2024, the number of EV companies (not models) went up to over 500. In the bloodbath of a price war that followed this number consolidated down to just over a hundred in 2024. That's almost 400+ companies shut down without counting the new ones that came into the market late. And it's still falling. Every month an EV brand goes under, and every month a new brand beats the sales of Tesla. BYD went from a car brand that quite literally gave me the ick (they looked absolutely horrendous back in 2019-2020) to a brand that's making the EU shake in their boots and threaten a trade war. 

I grew up in Singapore and I love my country. Still, watching fellow Singaporeans buy BYDs at over 180,000 SGD is... painful, to say the least. But it is a good product, and a good car.

Long live the Apple Car.

We've veered off track a little (:D) so let's get back to the topic. 

What is the "Apple Car"?

You see, to me, I envisioned the Apple Car to have a small white, glowing Apple logo on the outside, perhaps off-centre and to the right for recognisability. I envisioned a roundish-looking family vehicle that drove by itself. Maybe some really advanced systems, sensors and algorithms, running on not just the world's best batteries at zero emissions, but also the world's fastest chips. I envisioned -- 

... that. What the heck?

The "Apple Car" isn't a car. It's an idea. A concept, if you will. 🤮

But concepts mean nothing if we still see emissions on the road. If we still see NO2 as the primary polluter in the air. They mean nothing if my grandparents still can't have the car drive itself to the nearest park. They mean nothing if the wheelchair-bound still can't have an accessible way of travelling by themselves. 

It looks like a Porsche. It might even drive like a Taycan. But it also exists like a Taycan. That's the most important part, bar none.

Technology is at its best when it trickles down to everyone. Affordable, smart, efficient and emission-less vehicles have the potential to become some of the most powerful physical and social mobility tools out there, but someone has to first make them exist. Ideas mean nothing if not executed.

If companies have to die to push for innovation, so be it. The technology will live on, even if NIO doesn't.

In case it's not obvious by now, I might like cars. Just a little bit.

But not in the macho vroom-vroom way. Well, maybe a little. I watch F1 over FE, after all. (DID YOU HEAR VETTEL'S TALKING TO WOLFF?)

Cars represent progress. Transportation quite literally drives progress. Getting people to places quicker without sacrificing the blue skies is social mobility. It gives families a little more time with each other. It's why automotive engineers do what they do. And, yeah, earn some money along the way.

As long as we don't let up, maybe the Apple Car isn't dead after all.