▲ Image source network
Text | Guo Yu
Edited | Shi Zhiliang
I don't know if Apple CEO Tim Cook regretted not attending that meeting.
The meeting was proposed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who wanted to talk to Cook about Apple's possibility of buying Tesla at a sale price of about $60 billion.
It was Tesla's worst days. From mid-2017 to mid-2019, Tesla encountered a bottleneck in mass production of the Model 3, and the company was only a month away from bankruptcy, and for a time Musk slept in the factory every day.
Cook did not give a chance and simply refused to meet.
At that time, Apple already had its own car-building plan, code-named "Project Titan". On Apple's fiscal third quarter 2017 earnings call, Cook confirmed the existence of the Titan program for the first time. Cook believes that autonomous driving is the "mother of all AI projects", and Apple is focusing on autonomous driving systems from the perspective of core technology.
Time shift is easy. Tesla, which was sought to sell for $60 billion at the time, has now become the world's largest car company by market capitalization, with a market value of nearly $900 billion, equivalent to 4.5 Toyotas and 8 BYDs. Apple's Titan plan has undergone several twists and turns, several times has been passed on mass production, but also several times by the explosion of layoffs, executive changes, the most recent news is that the Apple car team has been dissolved a few months ago.
In the years when Apple tossed on the car, other technology companies competed to hunt the car circle. This is a story about Apple getting on the car, but in the same time coordinates, and more than that, it is also the day when a batch of new car-making forces were born and disappeared.
2014-2017: Get on the car or build a car? Apples are rocking
"Cars have batteries, computers, engines, and mechanical structures, and iPhones have those things, even engines."
In 2008, Apple founder Steve Jobs discussed the possibility of building a car with Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive, the father of the iPod and the founder of Nest. This was seen as the first signal that Apple wanted to build a car.
Also in 2008, Tesla, which now sells nearly a million units a year, released its first product: the Roadster two-door sports car.
From the first signal to the first explicit action to get on the car, Apple took five years. In 2013, Apple announced its entry into the field of internet of vehicles, releasing the "iOSin the car" in-vehicle system (later renamed CarPlay), and its first partners included Ferrari, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, which was the first time in Apple's history that it had installed its own software on the hardware products of other companies.
It was another four years before Apple officially announced its second on-board action: Project Titan. On Apple's fiscal third quarter 2017 earnings call, Cook confirmed the existence of the Titan program for the first time. Cook believes that autonomous driving is the "mother of all AI projects", and Apple is focusing on autonomous driving systems from the perspective of core technology.
But in the eyes of a large number of media, the Titan plan officially announced in 2017 is not new.
As early as early 2015, the Wall Street Journal said that Apple set up a car research and development center, the car project code named "Project Titan", focusing on the development of driverless smart cars. At that time, Apple recruited everywhere, attracting experts from Google, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla and other companies to form a car research and development team. Statistics show that within a year after its establishment, the R&D team gathered more than a thousand engineers to participate, of which more than 300 former Tesla employees.
At that time, China on the other side of the ocean was also embarking on a lively "car-making movement".
In 2014, He Xiaopeng, who had just sold UC to Alibaba, invested in Xiaopeng Motors. He Xiaopeng is optimistic about the development of smart electric vehicles and has not found a suitable investment target, so he pulled a team and gave them a sum of money to build a car. At the end of the same year, Li Bin's Weilai Automobile was established, and Jia Yueting's LeTV car-making SEE plan surfaced for the first time. In 2015, Li Xiang's ideal car, Shen Hui's Weima automobile, Zhu Jiangming's zero-run car and so on were established. Of course, there are also some car companies that have faded from memory: such as Byton, Green Chi, Singularity, Future, Ranger.
Their common goal is to make smart electric vehicles.
"Everyone who makes electric cars has to thank Tesla, which is ahead of us to do consumer education." Daniel Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Nezha Automobile, said in an interview with Travel One Passenger (ID: carcaijing).
Before 2014, Tesla had already released the Model S, a high-end SUV model. On April 22, 2014, the first batch of Chinese users, 8 Chinese entrepreneurs, officially received their Model S car keys from Musk. Among these 8 people was Li Xiang, the man who was the president of Autohome at the time and later founded the ideal car.
Back in 2015, Apple's car-making heart was vividly reflected in the domain name. In December 2015, Apple registered three domain names: "apple.car", "apple.cars" and "apple.auto". There are two kinds of speculation in the outside world, one is that these domain names are related to Apple's CarPlay in-car system, and the other is that Apple is going to build a car.
However, by the time Apple officially announced the Titan plan in 2017, the originally reported vehicle had become the autopilot system in Cook's mouth. What's going on in between? According to the US "Business Insider" (Business Insider) report, Apple once considered using the BMW i3 as the basis for Apple's car, but because it has not been discussed with BMW, especially the core issues such as project leadership and data ownership, there is no follow-up.
Judging from the official announcement, Apple began to all in the automatic driving system, and did not want to build the whole car for the time being.
In April 2017, Apple received a DMV (Vehicle Authority) license from the U.S. State of California to test autonomous vehicles on public roads. The license covers 3 Lexus RX450h SUVs and 6 safety drivers
Chinese counterparts, who have taken a similar path, seem to be moving much faster.
In 2017, Baidu established an intelligent driving business group and launched a program called "Apollo" to provide an open software platform for car companies and technology companies. That year, Baidu CEO Robin Li took the fifth ring road in Beijing in a driverless car and received a fine. "The driverless ticket has come, will the mass production of unmanned vehicles be far away?" Robin Li said.
Also in the early summer of 2017, in a basement in Hangzhou, China, Zhu Jiangming, CEO of Zero-Run Cars, was pulling a travel passenger (ID: carcaijing) to visit the global self-development of zero-run cars, such as powertrain and autonomous driving perception technology. This is a temporary office location for zero-running cars. Zhu Jiangming pointed to a group of technicians who were buried in their heads and said, "Backed by Dahua, zero running on automatic driving is no problem, and many people working here are talents of Dahua's visual perception algorithm." ”
2018-2019: Apple is poaching people, and the outside world is looking forward to it
You must be familiar with the saying: "Tesla is like the Apple of the automobile world".
"Disruptive" and "innovative" are the labels of Apple's previous achievements, and the iPhone is one of Apple's masterpieces. Before Apple launched the iPhone smartphone in 2007, the mobile phone market was basically divided into two camps, one was a functional mobile phone represented by Nokia with a number of nine keys, and the other was a "smart phone" represented by the BlackBerry full keyboard, but the intelligence at that time also needed a touch pen to operate the touch screen.
The emergence of the iPhone has made people throw away the touch pen and physical keyboard, realize the multi-touch of the finger and the screen, and at the same time launch fingerprint unlock, app store and other functions, so that other smartphones compete to chase.
Therefore, the industry has always had expectations for Apple's car:
"Tesla's biggest competitor is not Google, but Apple." —Tesla CEO Musk.
"[Our] biggest rival will be Google, Apple, not GM or FCA." —Mark Fields, Ford's CEO at the time.
"Apple poses a higher challenge to Volkswagen than Toyota." —Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen Group.
A generally accepted car-making logic in the industry is that technology companies see that new car-making companies are very popular in the capital market and are therefore eager to try.
"Only by building cars can we obtain a higher market value and have greater development opportunities." Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the National Passenger Car Market Information Joint Association, said in an interview with a travel passenger (ID: carcaijing) that even traditional veteran car companies have reacted to the deployment of high-end new energy intelligent networked vehicles with scientific and technological empowerment, in order to seize this wave of development, technology companies with Internet genes are not willing to only be suppliers of intelligent network solutions, and decided to move from getting on the car to building cars.
It is not only Apple, a technology company, that wants to build cars across borders. As early as 2017, Dyson officially announced the launch of the electric vehicle project, with plans to invest more than 2 billion pounds (about 2.5 billion US dollars). Looking at China, Dong Mingzhu, chairman of Gree Group, has also made up his mind to build cars and acquire Yinlong Automobile, which is mainly engaged in new energy buses; the high-end intelligent electric vehicle project jointly built by SAIC Motor, Pudong New Area and Alibaba has been named "Zhiji Automobile" and has settled in Pudong, Shanghai.
Therefore, just like Huawei's declaration that it will not build cars, Apple's official announcement of the automatic driving system does not dispel everyone's speculation, believing that it is only a matter of time before the next car is built.
But whether it's building a whole car or focusing on autopilot systems, Apple's shelf is already tied up: digging people from head smart car companies like Tesla and digging people from head technology companies like Google.
In this regard, Tesla CEO Musk has behaved quite calmly, at least it seems so. "They hired the people we fired. We always jokingly call Apple 'Tesla's grave'. If you can't stay at Tesla, go to Apple. In October 2015, 9to5mac, a technology news website that has long followed Apple's dynamics in the United States, reported that Musk said in an interview with German media that he was not worried about Apple's poaching, because the latter employed Tesla's "abandoned" employees.
But it's hard to say that musk can be so calm when people like Doug Field leave Tesla and turn to Apple.
In August 2018, Doug Field, former Apple's vice president of Mac hardware engineering, was rehired back to Apple after five years at Tesla. According to Apple News comment blog Daring Fireball, Field will be in charge of Apple's Titan project. Field by this time had become a senior vice president of engineering at Tesla and a chief automotive engineer for the Model 3.
After Field, Tesla had two more vice presidents to switch to Apple. In March 2019, Michael Schwekutsch, vice president of Tesla's electric drive systems, joined Apple. In July of the same year, Steve MacManus, vice president of research and development for Tesla's interior and exterior, joined Apple.
Also in 2019, Apple acquired self-driving startup Drive.ai to strengthen its own autonomous driving research and development capabilities.
According to incomplete statistics, as of 2020, Apple's Special Projects Group (mainly responsible for innovation projects) has a total of more than 1,200 people, of which 170 are from Ford Motor Company, more than 300 are from Tesla, and more than 110 are from automotive-related private research institutions.
2019-2020: The departure of people, the difficult birth of cars
It is reasonable to say that the big coffee comes to vote, and there is no shortage of money, and Apple can always toss out some achievements in the car.
But it backfired. According to the road test data released by the California DMV, in 2019, among the 58 self-driving companies (including 56 companies with autonomous driving road test licenses), Apple MPD (Miles Per Disengagement, the most intuitive indicator of the "driving level" of a self-driving car) was 117.88 miles (about 189.7 kilometers), and mpd ranked 13th. Google's Waymo MPD score is more than 112 times apple's, at 13,219.43 miles (about 21,200 kilometers).
In the past February 2022, Apple's DMV score still looks like it is the same, with an MPD of 20.02 miles (about 32 kilometers), ranking 22nd out of 28 companies that submitted results.
To a certain extent, patents can reflect Apple's achievements in building cars.
For example, a patent called "remotely-controlleddriving control of a vehicle": if the system determines that the driver has an emergency health condition and cannot drive the vehicle, the vehicle will be remotely activated to automatically activate the driver and directly take the driver to the nearest hospital for treatment.
In terms of in-vehicle intelligence, based on AR technology, Apple has developed the integration of actual roads on the front windshield, the realization of maps and navigation functions, while protecting privacy, while being able to display the actual surrounding environment on the surrounding car windows, as well as entertainment, video telephony and other functions.
However, the head of research and development of a domestic head car company said in an interview that because Apple wasted too much time, these technologies were very leading at the time, and at present, new energy vehicle companies such as Xiaopeng and Ideal have more or less taken the lead in landing these technologies, plus Ali, Baidu, Huawei and other large manufacturers are also rapidly laying out in terms of vehicle intelligence, and Apple's advantages are shrinking.
Bad is also layoffs and departures.
In January 2019, Apple underwent a restructuring of the Titan project team, firing about 200 employees. In 2021, Apple lost two major players in a row: Michael Schwekuch, the main engineer of the self-driving car project, and Field, who had just returned to his old owner for less than a year. In January 2022, Joe Bass, a project manager for autonomous driving systems engineering who had been at Apple for seven years, left his job.
Behind the personnel turmoil is the lack of stability of the project. Travel a passenger (ID: carcaijing) from many sources to understand that Apple and Ningde times, BYD and so on have talked about car-related cooperation, "but it seems that because they want to go to the United States to build a factory, everyone is not happy, they blew." After all, the team members are facing too many external temptations, and they also hope that the project will be landed as soon as possible.
At the same time, the news of Apple's car construction is endless.
On the one hand, the news of the failure to seek cooperation between car companies. The New York Times reported in 2018 that after Apple's proposed partnership with BMW and Mercedes-Benz failed, potential cooperation plans with other auto companies such as Nissan, BYD, McLaren and others also failed.
On the other hand, there is the news that Apple cars are about to debut. In December 2020, Taiwan's Economic Daily reported that Apple is making a stock request to Taiwanese auto parts manufacturers such as Heda, Trade Union, Heqin, and Tomita, and Apple is expected to release Apple cars in September 2021. According to Reuters, Apple plans to produce a pure electric passenger car in 2024. DigiTimes predicts that Apple cars will be unveiled between 2024 and 2025.
Standing at the time node of 2020, the Chinese companies that targeted the car track in the early years and Apple synchronously, some have built real cars and began to be delivered in batches, some self-driving taxis have begun to run on the road, some have even been listed and are preparing for IPOs, and some have begun to start from getting on the car to building cars. Some businesses have disappeared.
In 2020, Weilai Automobile experienced a roller coaster experience from a lifeline to a soaring stock price. At the beginning of 2020, Weilai Automobile was in a life-and-death situation due to cash flow shortages. In the end, Hefei reached out and signed a 7 billion yuan equity financing with WEILAI Automobile. Subsequently, WEIO's stock price rose from a low of $2.11 / share in 2020 to a maximum of 57.20 US dollars / share, a maximum increase of 26 times during the year.
Baidu has experienced the process from getting on the car to building a car. In October 2020, Baidu's self-driving taxi Apollo GO landed in Beijing, and the number of calls exceeded 2,600 in a single day. Three months later, in January 2021, Baidu announced the formal formation of a smart car company to enter the automotive industry as a vehicle manufacturer, and Geely Holding Group will become a strategic partner of the new company.
Zhu Jiangming, who once passionately introduced zero-run cars to people in the basement, also came to the spotlight in 2020. It was a zero-run car specification-level AI intelligent driving chip conference, at that time he was not very accustomed to the spotlight, before going on stage quietly said to the backstage people: "I held up the chip for a while, my hand shook what to do?" ”
But not all new car manufacturers are so lucky. Lu Chi, Sailin, Bo County, and Byton all left the game regrettably this year.
Newcomers have it too. This year, the independent brands in traditional car companies began to learn from those successful new car-making forces, such as BAIC launched ARCFOX (Polar Fox), Dongfeng launched Lantu, and SAIC launched Zhiji.
2021-2022: Another shutdown
The latest news about Apple's car is temporarily stuck on March 15, 2022. Tianfeng International analyst Guo Mingpei said on Twitter that the Apple Car team of Apple, which has been exposed for a long time, has been disbanded for a period of time. To meet the goal of achieving mass production by 2025, the team must restructure within the next 3 to 6 months.
Earlier, in February 2022, South Korea's East Asia Daily reported that Apple would invest 4 trillion won (about $3.6 billion) in South Korea's Kia Motors, and the two sides planned to launch Apple cars around 2024, with an initial goal of selling 100,000 cars a year.
When Apple's car-making plan became confusing again, the first pattern of China's new car-making forces has been formed.
Xiaopeng, Ideal and Weilai are pulling a gap with the car companies behind them, and their annual sales in 2021 will exceed 90,000 vehicles; Nezha, Weima and Zero Run are catching up. There are also many new enterprises, millet, light orange era, cattle created from the tour home, Binli, box, etc., these you have not heard of, all hope to become the next Wei Xiaoli, the next Tesla.
"I don't think we should say that we are the head until the annual sales of 300,000 and 500,000 vehicles are sold, everyone is working hard to survive." Daniel Zhang, CEO of Nezha Automobile, said in an interview with Travel One Passenger (ID: carcaijing).
After all, Tesla, which nearly sold that year, sold nearly a million electric cars in 2021. From the 0th to the 1 millionth, Tesla took 12 years. If Apple launches Apple Cars between 2024 and 2025, how long will it take to rewrite "Tesla is the Apple of the automotive world" to "Apple is the apple of the automotive world"?
(Reporter Li Haoyin also contributed)
"This article was first published on March 28 in Caijing magazine's 'Automotive and Mobility' section"