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Don't expect the Apple Car any time soon, says Ming-Chi Kuo

Next-gen CarPlay is all that might emerge from 'Project Titan'


A second remark from Ming-Chi Kuo on Wednesday suggests that he has lost visibility on the Apple Car, and isn't clear when the vehicle might go into production.

The Apple Car saga has stretched for about a decade at this point. There's never been any doubt that Apple has been working on vehicle technology, but the state of it has waxed and waned throughout the years.

In a post on X on Wednesday, Kuo appears to have "lost all visibility" on the project.

"If Apple doesn't adopt an acquisition strategy to enter the automotive market, I doubt that the Apple Car can go into mass production within the next years," he adds.

This isn't the first time Kuo has poured water on an Apple Car. In March, Kuo said that the Apple Car team had been dissolved, and a 2025 launch was in danger.

The team behind what's reportedly known internally as "Project Titan" have reportedly been disbanded and/or reorganized before. In 2016, Apple placed a hiring freeze on the team following unspecified executives being unhappy with progress.

After Kuo's March prediction of a dissolved Apple Car team, Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives asserted that it was a matter of "when, not if" the product would arrive, and he expected it by 2026.

It's not clear whose predictions about the product are right. For the last decade, the Apple Car is a project that always seems to be three years away — yet inevitable at the same time.

9 Comments

ravnorodom 9 Years · 729 comments

Like Elon Musk said, designing an EV car is easy. Going on mass production is hard.

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tht 24 Years · 5789 comments

My fringe speculation is that Apple is just waiting on Foxconn to be able to mass assemble cars after they struck out with an existing auto brand. Foxconn has not made much progress on this, and therefore Apple waits. If some other manufacturer wants to do it for Apple, they will get serious with them.

As long as Tim Cook is CEO, Apple will never own manufacturing plants. Strategic manufacturing equipment, perhaps, but even then, I think it some sort of strange contract where the assembler actually takes care of the equipment and everything.

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mistertrick 11 Years · 12 comments

Apple should have gone and acquired Lucid some years back if they wanted that quick in to the EV market

they still can, but it would be much more expensive and difficult now

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eriamjh 18 Years · 1816 comments

My sources say that many suppliers have all laughed at… err, I mean… no-quoted Apple  because they wanted top dollar product at craptastic volumes and dollar store prices.  

The best chance Apple has at making a car is using a company like Magna to build the car (like they do for Fisker), but it still has to be designed and tooled for everything a car needs.  Take designing an iPhone and increase the effort, expertise, and people needed by 100x or more.   

I have zero confidence there will ever be an Apple Car. 

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13485 7 Years · 393 comments

eriamjh said:
My sources say that many suppliers have all laughed at… err, I mean… no-quoted Apple  because they wanted top dollar product at craptastic volumes and dollar store prices.  

The best chance Apple has at making a car is using a company like Magna to build the car (like they do for Fisker), but it still has to be designed and tooled for everything a car needs.  Take designing an iPhone and increase the effort, expertise, and people needed by 100x or more.   
I have zero confidence there will ever be an Apple Car. 

Apple could very well use Magna if they have the capacity, or they could buy Lucid, which has a manufacturing facility in Arizona and is burning through their capital at prodigious rates, sinking their stock to bargain prices. 

As far as how long it takes to bring a car to market, Lucid was founded in 2006, Fisker in 2007, Tesla in 2003. Apple Car began in 2008 under Jobs, and has been designing since then. Tooling doesn't have to take long with various elements of modern manufacturing technology, and many parts are off-the-shelf like everyone else does. I don't think that's the issue.

The real issue is that they never stop re-designing, so no design is final.

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