So much for going to the Apple website and clicking on the AppleCar product section. I'm sure Elon Musk is laughing harder now than when he became the richest man on the planet. It's already game over for Apple when it comes to EV sales. I can understand why Wall Street is going to put most of its money into Tesla rather than Apple. Big investors are far more excited over EVs than smartphones because share gains will be much higher for Tesla than Apple. EVs have replaced cloud storage as the low-hanging fruit for making unlimited revenue. Apple has now missed out on both. For every Tesla Model S Plaid Plus sold, Apple will have to sell 100 iPhone 13 Pro Max units. Apple shareholders are not going to be happy with that thought. Tesla has now secured the necessary investor mindshare to permanently have a P/E of 1400. Apple will struggle to hold a P/E of 40. Musk wins again as the CEO with the Midas Touch.
The problem is that Tesla makes very few cars and only makes a profit from selling carbon credits. They also have some very serious competitors now. VW just sold 121,000 EV’s and many PHEV’s. The ID3 is now the second best selling car in Germany behind the Golf. And Ford, GM, BMW, Mercedes, PSA and the Koreans are about to release various EV models. Sell that overvalued Tesla stock now.
Betting against Elon Musk is a bit like betting against Tom Brady because both have variety of weapons at their disposal and neither likes to lose.
Well, Loopless is right though. Tesla's market share in Europe is rapidly dwindling, and most of the Tesla's on the road here in my (European) home country were basically bought because of tax credits. Now that these tax credits are about to disappear (everyone is going electric anyway) Tesla is already taking a serious hit. Tesla is now building a big factory near Berlin, and I am interested to see how well it will perform. I have already read some stories about Tesla not allowing unionization of its employees, but I believe that that position is legally not tenable in Germany. Someone in the know might enlighten us on that.
Part of me thinks this entire thing has been a media/analyst creation. Apple has confirmed or denied nothing. Said nothing, hinted at nothing, has spent the past couple of weeks as though nothing was going on.
So much for going to the Apple website and clicking on the AppleCar product section. I'm sure Elon Musk is laughing harder now than when he became the richest man on the planet. It's already game over for Apple when it comes to EV sales. I can understand why Wall Street is going to put most of its money into Tesla rather than Apple. Big investors are far more excited over EVs than smartphones because share gains will be much higher for Tesla than Apple. EVs have replaced cloud storage as the low-hanging fruit for making unlimited revenue. Apple has now missed out on both. For every Tesla Model S Plaid Plus sold, Apple will have to sell 100 iPhone 13 Pro Max units. Apple shareholders are not going to be happy with that thought. Tesla has now secured the necessary investor mindshare to permanently have a P/E of 1400. Apple will struggle to hold a P/E of 40. Musk wins again as the CEO with the Midas Touch.
See above. Toyota wouldn't agree to these terms either. The auto industry is not the electronics industry. To put it another way: a lot of the suppliers that Apple deals with for the iPhone and iPad need Apple's business to survive, and a lot of them wind up going out of business even with Apple's money. You aren't going to see any established manufacturer agree to make Apple's car that will:
A. provide them tiny margins for manufacturing them B. provide them no PR/marketing benefits for manufacturing them C. compete with their own cars
Toyota is not going to make less money making cars for Apple than they would get for getting people to buy a Camry. Were Apple to:
A. pay Toyota as much money for making an Apple Car as they would get for making a Camry B. allow Toyota to let everyone know that they are Apple's manufacturing partner in their advertising campaigns so that at the very least everyone who doesn't buy an Apple Car will be more likely to buy a Camry than a Ford, Volkswagen, Honda or Nissan
then they would probably sign up. You folks need to take the idea "being an Apple partner automatically benefits the partner so anyone and everyone who Apple wants to partner with should just drop everything else and agree to whatever terms Apple requests" and flush it from your heads. Because it isn't true. At all.
Neither would it benefit Apple to go "bargain basement" until they find someone willing to meet their demands. Why? Because you don't get the best work that way. When Apple was in the middle of their little temper tantrums against Samsung, Google, Qualcomm etc. they tried to go elsewhere. It didn't work because LG, Intel, their in-house services etc. weren't nearly as good so they were forced to go back to the best in order to get the best components and services for their products. By the same token, Apple shouldn't seek the services of "we build terrible cars for cheap" outfits lest they get the equivalent of Intel 5G modems, LG screens and their own services before they went all in on AWS and Google to provide the backbones (i.e. back when they couldn't even produce a competitive navigation app).
Instead, pay Hyundai, Toyota or whoever else the money that it takes to build a good car. Including a company that is able to contribute their own pre-existing expertise to the product. Samsung, for example, was able to contribute some designs from some appliance-type devices (ARM-based but running firmware and hence not smart devices) to the original iPhone CPU. That is the sort of thing that they will need to get from their car-manufacturing partner if they actually want the car to be good.
They either need to do as you’ve stated, or go the deep, expensive, riskier route of doing it from scratch so they can get the terms they want from smaller suppliers of parts and design details, but as complex as building an iPhone is, getting a modern EV with Apple’s special sauce is putting 2 complex things together in terms of manufacturing know-how and logistics. I suppose what Apple has in their favor that perhaps the other auto makers don’t is they can afford to pay absurd money to get good talent, since their current main business might as well be called money printing.
Apple has earned a reputation for how they negotiate and treat contractors and partners, and my oldest brother, before he was forcibly retired for health reasons from a career in printing, had firsthand experience with “the Apple Way” and from what he observed, Apple is (most charitably) a royal PITA to deal with, and is very hard to be profitable with them as a customer due to their fantasy in what is feasibly achievable. And that’s with printing, something Apple has no way I’ve heard of possibly playing hardball in regards to IP licensing.
Personally, I’d not do business with Apple with much exposure to start: that’s not workable for cars, as there’s no “a little bit pregnant” in that level of capital expenditure.
It occurs to me Tata Motors Ltd. might be a good fit with Jaguar and Landrover's level of prestige and quality.
Prestige, yes. Quality, no.
My new Jaguar is very well made I can assure you. I assume you think Kias are better made than Jags and RangeRovers? Remember the Brits got the production back from Ford.
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Apple has earned a reputation for how they negotiate and treat contractors and partners, and my oldest brother, before he was forcibly retired for health reasons from a career in printing, had firsthand experience with “the Apple Way” and from what he observed, Apple is (most charitably) a royal PITA to deal with, and is very hard to be profitable with them as a customer due to their fantasy in what is feasibly achievable. And that’s with printing, something Apple has no way I’ve heard of possibly playing hardball in regards to IP licensing.
Personally, I’d not do business with Apple with much exposure to start: that’s not workable for cars, as there’s no “a little bit pregnant” in that level of capital expenditure.