Mike Wuerthele
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.
Thomas Sibilly
Andrew O'Hara
Amber Neely
Marko Zivkovic
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher and Mike Wuerthele
9 Comments
Like Elon Musk said, designing an EV car is easy. Going on mass production is hard.
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.
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
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.