Apple Car Challenges: Sobering Thoughts

I hate the term "range anxiety". The industry used to throw it around all the time. That term shifts the blame from the product to the customer. The issue is that a vehicle with a range under 100 miles is not that useful. I could drive a car like that to work most days, but I could not make a significant deviation - to go to another work facility, customer or supplier site, or even to see a friend for dinner after work. That is not MY anxiety, it's a problem with the car. You don't overcome "range anxiety" by doing anything with the customer, you do it by putting a big battery in the car like Tesla. You can take a Tesla on a pretty long trip, or you can drive it around town all damn day with no worry.

The big flaw with this article is that the reality is there really is only one great electric vehicle on the market, the model S. And the model S is a luxury car.<p>So, an interesting number would be the % of luxury car purchases that are electric over time. I would imagine this is probably trending up, and that&#x27;s just due to a single model from a single manufacturer.

I think people forget Tim Cook&#x27;s background in supply chain. He is one of the most experienced &quot;process-oriented&quot; managers in the world, backed up by $203 billion in cash, with a reputation for lifestyle products and a strong team.<p>I don&#x27;t think he has underestimated the challenge.

Starting from scratch is such a monumental feat. Why wouldn&#x27;t Apple just use it&#x27;s cash reserves and buy out an existing car maker? They could literally buy pretty much any automaker they want, why not start with something like Fiat Chrysler, for a bargain basement price of $10B?<p>I&#x27;m a supply chain guy. I work for a company with one of the top peer-rated supply chains in the world and Apple is still so far ahead of us that it isn&#x27;t even funny. Apple could, with minimal comparative effort (as in, easier than any other company, not <i>easily</i>), translate their manufacturing supply chain knowledge towards automotive manufacturing and optimize it to the point of absurd superiority over every other automaker out there. That alone could change the profitability of the company significantly toward self-sustainability within a matter of a 3-4 years. Throw in a well funded software and hardware research division, poach the top specialized auto manufacturing talent, and you have a recipe for the next Toyota or (forgive the faux pas) VW.<p>But if you start from scratch, you are going to be 10 years away from making a dent in the market, regardless of how much expertise you have.

<i>&quot;Tesla takes 0.15% while losing about $4,000 per vehicle.&quot;</i><p>Other sources claim that Tesla is making 25% profit per Model S, and similar for the Model X. Is this article cherry-picking numbers?

<i>there’s no Moore’s Law for batteries — their “power” doesn’t double every 18 or 24 months.</i><p>However, industry-wide figures for power density show a clear upward trend. It&#x27;s not exponential like Moore&#x27;s law, but in just under a decade or so, electric cars are going to have range parity with gasoline ones.<p>Also, the graph is misleading. If you combine Tesla EV and other EVs, there is a very promising upward curve in the lower right-hand corner.

If Apple doesn&#x27;t do it or do it properly, someone else will. Who really cares what company ends up making good, safe, reliable electric cars?<p>I think it goes without saying that they&#x27;re not going to use the same engineering techniques they use for their other software to develop the software for the car. It&#x27;s not about culture. It&#x27;s about adopting very stringent procedures similar to NASA, aeronautics firms, and other industries that need to build software with extremely low rates of error. This has nothing to do with culture. These processes exist because culture fails when such low error rates and resiliency is required. Airplanes have been running incredibly complicated software without issue for decades. For that matter, cars too. Making this a culture issue is frankly ignorant of the whole software development process.<p>As for his past sales figures and argument that people aren&#x27;t buying electric cars, he misses the point that other than Tesla there are few practical electric cars if any (Leaf&#x27;s range is too short, Prius isn&#x27;t an electric car, it&#x27;s a hybrid, etc.) and the Teslas are priced for the upper class only.

Apple is a consumer electronics company. They build focused hardware with software that they patch over time. Cars don&#x27;t work like that. Cars are like building 100 products into one thing. Fine tuning every aspect of there design is incredibly difficult and is reflected in cost. A software for cars is completely different. For Apple to completely commit to cars, the dynamic within its culture will have to radically change. Look at Tesla, their employee culture is nothing like the other SV companies.

At what point are companies going to give up on electric and look at other possible alternatives like hydro or something nobody has come up with like converting trash to renewable energy?<p>I still have issues with the environmental impact with electric fuel cell manufacturing and recycling. It&#x27;s horrible on the environment and the recycling issues (hell, we still have problems just recycling plastics) cause me to doubt electric as a long-term viable solution.<p>Just in case:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;vital-signs&#x2F;2015&#x2F;jun&#x2F;10&#x2F;tesla-batteries-environment-lithium-elon-musk-powerwall" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;vital-signs&#x2F;2015&#x2F;jun&#x2F;10&#x2F;tesla-bat...</a><p><i>In a 2013 report, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Design for the Environment program concluded that batteries using nickel and cobalt, like lithium-ion batteries, have the “highest potential for environmental impacts”. It cited negative consequences like mining, global warming, environmental pollution and human health impacts.</i><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubs.acs.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;10.1021&#x2F;es903729a" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubs.acs.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;10.1021&#x2F;es903729a</a><p><i>The main finding of this study is that the impact of a Li-ion battery used in BEVs for transport service is relatively small. In contrast, it is the operation phase that remains the dominant contributor to the environmental burden caused by transport service as long as the electricity for the BEV is not produced by renewable hydropower</i>

Anyone care to tl;dr this?