Automotive Partnerships and the Next-Generation Automotive Industry: Why We’re Putting eas into the Future with Autonomous Systems

Nearly a decade after first launching Project Titan, Apple is back where it started. It has never really taken shape beyond the rough, embarrassed imagining of the most devoted fan base. It seems that the decision to quit seems to have been a wasted effort but potential competitors and investors say it was a smart one.

The development of hardware and software needed to enable a car to drive itself was more aligned with Apple than building a whole car from scratch, to be sure. In California, the company made some progress and released a seven-page safety report to federal regulators.

The car, which may have been made at the Georgia plant, was in early talks to develop with Apple. Apple car representatives reportedly met with European manufacturers as late as last month.

The senior vice president of innovation at the Center for automotive research says that any tech company that wants to break into the automotive space needs partnerships. He says the same is true for any company that wants to compete with the tech natives.

Partnerships, however, have been the crux of other tech-car schemes. Sony and Honda formed a joint venture to build an electric prototype called Afeela, which will be ready for ship in the year 2026. Kenichiro Yoshida told the Wall Street Journal that visiting the welding shop at Honda’s Ohio assembly plant confirmed that working together was the correct move for the electronics company. He said that it would be difficult to do on our own. “It turns out you really do need a partner.”

The Chinese are particularly eager to sell cars, with the hope that they can revive flagging phone sales. And a lot of them are teaming with more traditional auto players to do it. Xiaomi unveiled its first electric vehicle late last year and has announced its intention to become a top global automaker, with a manufacturing assist from state-owned automaker BAIC Group. Baidu is working with the Geely Holding Group on its EV. The electric car brand Luxeed was launched last November by Chery and Huawei.

We’re focusing on the future. And clearly, one purpose of autonomous systems are self-driving cars,” Cook said in an interview with Bloomberg. “And we sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects. It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on and so autonomy is something that’s incredibly exciting for us, but we’ll see where it takes us.”

Wall Street was skeptical of Apple because it viewed it as an expensive distraction with more negatives than positives. Dan said it was the right move for Cook & Co. to remove the band-aid. Morgan Stanley’s analysts praised the company for “focusing on what matters” and “exhibiting cost discipline.”

“Affordability is an increasing problem and since Apple isn’t going to want to sell an entry level EV, that leaves them with an increasingly tight premium market,” he said. It won’t be easy for Apple if the new companies can’t find a way to sell expensive EV with products as good as they have.

If Apple were to suddenly parachute onto this stage, the tech giant would likely confront similar headwinds, said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst at Guidehouse Insights.

The Next Step: Apple, Waymo, and Cruise on a Closed Autonomy Ecosystem? The Challenges of Driving an Autonomous Vehicle

But Apple never really caught up to its rivals, who had been working on this problem longer and with more resources to spend. It didn’t get a permit to operate vehicles without safety drivers in the front seat. And the size of the company’s fleet stayed relatively flat. But Apple stuck to it. Last year, the company bested Waymo and Cruise in the rate of increase of miles traveled by its autonomous vehicles, The Washington Post reported.

But it’s the next step, and the step after that, that proved too daunting. Apple only had a slim chance of making this work because it was likely to be a closedrobotaxi ecosystem, a monthly subscription service. That is yet to be proven in a business model. Even Elon Musk can’t seem to make the math — or technology — work.