The Rumored Apple Car Is Bad News for Elon

Plus: The Ford heir, presidential briefings, and a sad day for gadget lovers.
apple campus
Photograph:  Sam Hall/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Hey, everyone. As we creep into a year of lockdown, I am buoyed by the vaccine and terrified by the variants. Triple masks, anyone?

The Plain View

“Where should we go next?” asked Steve Jobs. It was almost exactly 10 years ago, and Apple’s CEO wasn’t asking for advice, but rather opening up the subject of Apple’s future, one that would unfold without him. I was meeting him informally, alongside fellow reporter John Markoff, with the unspoken understanding that this might be our last conversation, and indeed it was. Jobs died later that year. This week was his birthday; he would have been 66.

Markoff suggested speech technology. I noted that Apple had not really made its mark on living room entertainment. Jobs had another idea. People kept asking him, he said, if Apple was going to design a car. “If I were 10 years younger and healthier,” he said, “I’d do it.”

A decade later, Apple devices can talk back to you, and the company is producing Hollywood movies. And now credible sources are reporting that Apple is serious about making that car. A few years ago, the company reportedly pulled back on an effort to develop an autonomous vehicle, but multiple sources are now reporting that Apple has put the project back in gear. We hear that key executive John Giannandrea (Google’s former AI chief) is in charge, that Apple may partner with Hyundai to manufacture it, and that the company is shopping for lidar sensors to help the cars drive themselves.

Some observers are cool on the idea, noting that the profit margins in the auto industry are puny compared with those in the software world. But Apple is a 2 trillion-dollar company whose main product, the iPhone, is approaching market saturation. It needs to move into a business that will keep pushing its stock price up. The Wall Street valuation of Tesla, Apple’s natural competitor in cars, is now around $700 billion. Where else could Apple get a jump like that? One analyst opined that if Apple got 1 percent of the auto market, it would reap $50 billion in revenues. That’s an interesting way to look at it, because when Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007, he made the low-balling remark that if the new device got a single percent of the market, it would sell 10 million units. That was many billions of units ago.

Could Apple succeed with a car? Well, the company’s recent Macintosh was distinguished not only by speedy chips but unprecedented battery life. So it’s not surprising that we’ve heard the Apple car will have groundbreaking battery tech, a game changer for electric cars. (On the other hand, Macs still require “dongles” to connect with common peripherals like printers, ring lights, and external drives.)

But even more important will be whether Apple can produce something that transforms the concept of what a car is. That might be a challenge, because Tesla has essentially done this already. When you drive a Tesla, or even sit in one as a passenger, it’s immediately clear that the technology now at the center of our lives has finally been integrated into cars. The dashboard, with its wide display, provides maximum access not only to the car’s functions but to the connected world around it. Some people have even called Tesla an iPhone on wheels.

It’s a hard act to follow. But what company is better placed to challenge Musk than the one that made the iPhone?

Pitifully, but maybe not unexpectedly, this is something that the Detroit carmakers do not seem to understand. In 2015 I visited Bill Ford, chair of the company bearing his name, and asked him what he thought about Telsa. He gave it measured praise, as if it was just another competitor that had come off a conventional assembly line. I wanted to shake him. It’s not about drivetrains, Bill, it’s a paradigm shift! That same year, General Motors CEO Mary Barra was asked a similar question at a conference—the interlocutor was just about begging her to acknowledge Tesla, and her answer was similarly obtuse. Yes, she’d driven a Telsa, she said. The nicest thing she said about it was that it was “new.” Six years later, both companies have credible electric vehicles, but they don’t take your breath away like a Tesla does. Which is why Tesla’s stock price is several times those of Ford and GM combined.

So it seems logical that Apple has the best shot at taking on Elon Musk to rule this century’s roads. The Apple car is not a sure thing (and of course Apple has not commented on what its plans are), but if it does appear, I hope that the iCar will reflect the earth-shattering rethinking that Jobs himself brought to the personal computer, music players, and phones. And that it doesn’t require a dongle for charging.

Time Travel

Here’s an excerpt from the Backchannel story where I wrote about that Bill Ford interview, which took place in his office in Dearborn, Michigan, “a wood-paneled man-cave full of toys and mementos.” But, Henry Ford’s great-grandson told me, it was designed with sustainable materials, from the acoustic tiles to the rugs:

It’s one thing for an automaker to hire cool engineers but quite another to think like a Silicon Valley company. Yet Bill Ford says that culture is starting to change, because it must. “Failure is going to have to be something we accept with and deal with, in a way that is different,” he says … But what if, I ask, the most unwelcome message might be that Ford’s cultural advances are not enough? The next wave of cars—the ones built from scratch by tech companies—may be so drastically rethought that a legacy automaker would never dare to make the clean break from legacy to match them. One takeaway from the Tesla experience is that the car of the future might best be seen as a software-driven gadget that’s an adjunct to the same system that runs your phone—just one more component in your connected life.

Ford doesn’t buy it; accepting this paradigm would overly diminish the role he sees for his company. “We don’t want to be the handset, to use your analogy,” he says. “To be just the assembler of other peoples’ interesting technology is not an interesting outcome to me. But this world that we’re entering into is going to require partnerships, it’s going to require us to work with technology companies, startups, very small companies.”

Ask Me One Thing

Thomas asks, “Why do past presidents get or need security briefings?”

Thanks for the question, Thomas. I am not a historian, but lately I’ve been reading Obama’s White House memoir and my former colleague Jon Alter’s excellent Jimmy Carter biography. And I bought my wife a great Abe Lincoln biography for Valentine’s Day (I know, what a romantic). So I am feeling very informed about presidential history these days. The answer to your question, Thomas, seems to be that successors often seek advice from previous presidents on monumental issues, and that advice could be more helpful if the formers are up to speed on classified information. It could also help if they serve on advisory boards, or even go on missions where that information will help them. Apparently, President 46 doesn’t seem to think that 45 will have much to offer, so no intel agents will be traveling to Mar-a-Lago. I will comment no further. So, GOP readers, don’t cancel your WIRED subscriptions!

You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.

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