Could Apple have created a car as amazing as the McLaren GTS?Apparently, he has an idea about it, and now we probably won’t see him again, as many Apple automotive concepts were scrapped after the company reportedly spent more than a billion dollars a year. year in his ill-fated Apple Car.
A rival to McLaren isn’t the only type of car Apple is considering. According to Bloomberg, he is also creating prototypes of a VW-style motorhome and a modular vehicle like the Canoo, dubbed the Bread Loaf.
Bloomberg’s well-documented story suggests that Apple had a lot of money but not a lot of direction: In addition to designing its own cars, it was “evaluating partnerships or acquisitions” with Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, and McLaren. among others. ” But Apple has never been on the verge of testing giant-scale self-driving prototypes in public.
One of the most attractive elements of the story is the detail that Apple is considering buying Tesla. At the time, Tesla was less successful, with a valuation of about 1/20th of its current value. But even though Apple had meetings with Elon Musk, negotiations were interrupted by Tim Cook when they were still in their early stages.
This is thought to be partly because the automotive sector’s margins are very different from those of the iPhone and iPad: Apple’s gross profit margins are more than double those of the major successful EV makers.
With a Tesla deal on the table, Apple, however, was still looking to be a supplier in the automotive sector, the high-end sector, where high-value consumers wouldn’t resist a premium price. But the project, dubbed Project Titan, has been plagued from the start by internal conflicts and a lack of agreement on how much driving autonomy the car deserves to have.
Some Apple experts felt that driver assistance would be the most productive way forward; Others were looking for fully autonomous driving capabilities, i. e. , level five, where cars don’t have idlers or pedals. Tier-five cars are still the flying cars of the industry, something long promised: Elon Musk has promised that it will be a year away from fully autonomous driving from 2016. – but never delivered. Apple’s most recent target has been downgraded to Level 2, which is very compatible with Tesla’s existing motive power assist.
If Apple had managed to create it, you’d pay a maximum price for it and keep paying. Fully autonomous driving has been designed as a subscription service; after shelling out $85,000 for your Apple Car, Apple would rate you for self-driving features, as well as Apple Music and Apple TV. And even then, Apple would have lost money: the estimated cost of making its $85,000 car was $110,000.
Apple can, of course, play around for the long haul with new products, as demonstrated lately with the Vision Pro. But it turns out that the Apple Car has been more of a hungry caterpillar than a car. If you want to drive an Apple-style McLaren, it looks like the GTS, with its CarPlay compatibility, is as close as it gets.
Writer, musician, and host Carrie Marshall has been covering generation since 1998 and is primarily interested in how the generation can live our most productive lives. His CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, internet sites and radio shows ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, two more and co-authored seven more books and a documentary series for Radio 2. When she’s not doodling, she’s the lead singer of the Glasgow rock band HAVR (havrmusic. com).