Cleantech News Link Drop (40-Year Wind Turbines, Apple Electric Car, Epic Chicago Auto Show Rundown, Tesla Paradoxes…)
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Apple isn’t going to build a car. People need to stop thinking that.
Apple needs a new business. They’re swimming in money. Why wouldn’t they look to cars as opposed to, say, refrigerators or skateboards?
Because it doesn’t make business sense for them to build a car from the ground up when they are already so incredibly far behind. They can make lots of money designing the software for cars and maybe even a full dash without having to incur the costs and risks of building entire factories for car batteries, the cars themselves, etc.
The idea of a car that presumably proprietary is also incredibly stupid. By definition, you can’t market to a massive portion of car buyers that way.
There are two routes to getting into the car business.
They could go the Tesla route. Hire a bunch of smart people who know how to build cars and have a product on the market much faster than Tesla did. Apple has the money to skip the Roadster step and go straight to full build. Plus they’ve watched Tesla do the heavy lifting, then sharing.
Or they could go the BYD route. Buy an existing car company and build off of their expertise, manufacturing capacity and supply streams. Call in a quality manufacturer to help increase product quality like BYD bringing in Daimler.
BTW, most EV manufacturers are not building their own batteries. Even Tesla sources their cells from Panasonic and assembles their battery packs from them. And that’s how their new gigafactory is designed to work. Panasonic will be in the house making cells, Sending them down the line to Tesla who will finish the job and ship them off to the Tesla factory (factories).
(I’m not predicting Apple will build cars. Just not seeing a reason why they couldn’t.)
Lots of companies could build cars if they were determined to do so. I would still place a sizable bet on Apple being interested in software, services, and dashes; not entire cars.
And even though they are obviously different concepts, just look at the whole iTV rumor mill for years. Never happened, and that was much simpler. And Apple has yet to bring a full set top box/tv service to market like so many people reported they were working on. Again, those haven’t happened despite years of rumors and being much more easily integrated into Apple’s business.
You are entitled to your own opinion.
Mine is that it would make little sense for Apple to enter a commodity market like TVs. Better to move into an emerging market where profit margins are likely to be higher.
Again, not predicting Apple will make cars. But not predicting they won’t.
Margins in the auto industry are like 5-6% if you’re successful, which relatively speaking is really low.