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Apple Car Challenges: Sobering Thoughts

49 points by nichodges 11y ago

joesmo 11y ago
If Apple doesn't do it or do it properly, someone else will. Who really cares what company ends up making good, safe, reliable electric cars? I think it goes without saying that they're not going to use the same engineering techniques they use for their other software to develop the software for the car. It's not about culture. It'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. As for his past sales figures and argument that people aren't buying electric cars, he misses the point that other than Tesla there are few practical electric cars if any (Leaf's range is too short, Prius isn't an electric car, it's a hybrid, etc.) and the Teslas are priced for the upper class only.
- zardo 11y ago
  I don't know about airplanes, but cars certainly have their issues. The problem of developing highly reliable software isn't really a solved one. If anything, I think Apple has the advantage of not already being entrenched in an old process.
stcredzero 11y ago
there’s no Moore’s Law for batteries — their “power” doesn’t double every 18 or 24 months. However, industry-wide figures for power density show a clear upward trend. It's not exponential like Moore's law, but in just under a decade or so, electric cars are going to have range parity with gasoline ones. 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.
- mikeash 11y ago
  It is exponential, actually, it's just that the growth rate is more like 1.05x per year, not the 1.5x per year of Moore's law.
- hueving 11y ago
  >but in just under a decade or so, electric cars are going to have range parity with gasoline ones. Only if investment and breakthroughs continue. Moore's law worked out well because people kept buying computers constantly since they were useful even while much slower. When it comes to electric cars though, there is little incentive for consumers to buy them at the moment so there is a significant risk of investment petering out.
  - stcredzero 11y ago
    Only if investment and breakthroughs continue. Investment and breakthroughs in lithium ion batteries were not and are not only driven by electric vehicles. Far, far from it, as a matter of fact.
    - hueving 11y ago
      What else is the major use case for high-power batteries?
phkahler 11y ago
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.
- kozak 11y ago
  I live in a climate where you can potentially get stuck in the snow for few hours when going between cities (that happens maybe once per year, but today is exactly such a day, for example). In a gasoline car you would at least stay warm while waiting for the road to be unblocked. With an electric car, this might easily turn into a survival situation.
  - gfodor 11y ago
    Being stuck in traffic barely drains the battery. It's range anxiety, not time anxiety.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - beambot 11y ago
      What about running the heater to stay alive and defrosted?
      - recursive 11y ago
        10 horsepower is more than 7 kilowatts of output. I think a typical car heater uses much less than this. Perhaps someone knows more precise figures.
FreedomToCreate 11y ago
Apple is a consumer electronics company. They build focused hardware with software that they patch over time. Cars don'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.
- seivan 11y ago
  Wifi, two cameras one with a flash, finger-print, GPS, gyro, accelerometer, display, force-sensitive touch displays, sensors for display, cell-reception, in/out microphone ports, co-motion processor, bluetooth, speakers, etc etc. Not to mention a ton of software. Those are several products in one. Wether or not they actually build and design everything themselves is irrelevant. Not all car companies makes everything themselves, most share engines and other parts.
  - kunai 11y ago
    Vehicle engineering is on an entirely different scale to a mobile device. Imagine having to engineer all of that for one phone — and then as many times over as it takes to equal the volume of an average car — there you have your engineering challenge. It's a massive undertaking. Musk was able to pull off Tesla because he saw a frontier that needed to be saturated, and has a history of trailblazing through new industries. It's not that Apple can't do it. They'll just have a hard time doing so.
  - Shivetya 11y ago
    The complexity is still vastly different with cars than any electronic device Apple builds. All those individual items you list are likely in your future car if not already there buried among a hundred to thousand more such complex items. While Apple may be supply chain wizards in electronics they would need to replicate it many times over to build cars and even then create a whole new distribution and support system. I think their best bet is to be the smarts of all cars, why restrict themselves to just their own cars. Just launching one car would cost them a sizable chunk of their money trying to launch more than one would be many times more difficult, just ask Tesla. Tesla isn't out of the woods because unlike Apple they don't have the reserves to spend; assuming Apple stock holders would go along with the idea of spending tens of billions to start yet another car company. No, I think Apple is better at being another supplier and getting everyone into their game. That gives them more flexibility and more penetration for a lot less. They are likely also the only company that could get their logos on the screens of all cars
iambateman 11y ago
I think people forget Tim Cook's background in supply chain. He is one of the most experienced "process-oriented" managers in the world, backed up by $203 billion in cash, with a reputation for lifestyle products and a strong team. I don't think he has underestimated the challenge.
- wmeredith 11y ago
  I also thought the point made about innovation in production technology being the main driver of success in the auto industry as something that would be very attractive for Apple. Many, if not most, of their breakthroughs in the last few years have been in hardware manufacturing tech.
- ploxiln 11y ago
  While that's true, this blog post points out that to make a dent in the market, you need some factories. You can't just have Foxconn assemble your cars with key parts from Samsung. I don't think Apple can pull a rabbit out of a hat with a surprise "special announcement" of an Apple Car, nor can they make a surprise pre-announcement 6 or even 12 months before availability of a car... it's going to be pretty obvious that they're building a car factory a couple years before anyone can buy one. And we don't see that yet.
- monk_e_boy 11y ago
  For Apple, they must be thinking about cars vs other things. Maybe electric cars are a great idea, but VR maybe a much better idea (seeing as a VR headset is basically two iPohnes glued together)
jobu 11y ago
"Tesla takes 0.15% while losing about $4,000 per vehicle." Other sources claim that Tesla is making 25% profit per Model S, and similar for the Model X. Is this article cherry-picking numbers?
- plorkyeran 11y ago
  It's making the mistake of dividing their operating loss by number of cars sold and then concluding they're losing that much money for each car they sell.
at-fates-hands 11y ago
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? I still have issues with the environmental impact with electric fuel cell manufacturing and recycling. It'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. Just in case: http://www.theguardian.com/vital-signs/2015/jun/10/tesla-batteries-environment-lithium-elon-musk-powerwall http://www.theguardian.com/vital-signs/2015/jun/10/tesla-bat... 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. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es903729a http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es903729a 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
- millstone 11y ago
  Err, how would a hydro powered car work, without a battery? > 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” The highest potential for environmental impact among current Li-ion battery chemistries. This chemistry is currently best-in-class for energy storage, but it is an area of very active research. For example, lithium-air batteries hold promise for more energy storage with a carbon cathode. Of course grid power is also moving to renewables.
gfodor 11y ago
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. 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's just due to a single model from a single manufacturer.
saosebastiao 11y ago
Starting from scratch is such a monumental feat. Why wouldn't Apple just use it'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? I'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't even funny. Apple could, with minimal comparative effort (as in, easier than any other company, not easily), 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. 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.
- primrosepath 11y ago
  Because the auto companies are far, far behind on software and, now in comparison to Tesla, hardware. I was told by a GM employee in their tech center in Warren, they have COBOL running in VMs on modern servers whose terminal screens get scraped into excel spread sheets. This is one of many examples I could give you. I could literally spend hours telling you the horror stories. It's government levels of inefficiencies and leadership has little or no visibility into the system. Everyone in Metro-Detroit knows of the problems in the auto industry. The leadership lacks vision and workers find their niche and retire hoping to do the same things with maybe a promotion to management. There is not a constant drive, at least in the software side of things, to constantly improve and learn like in there is in Silicon Valley. The above is applicable to GM and Ford. Chrysler, on the other hand, is a whole other level of screwed. There's a reason they've been bailed out 2 times by the government and now bought/merged by a foreign car company, AGAIN. Apple, Google, Tesla and Uber will crush all but a few existing automakers, around the globe, and leadership has just now come around to acknowledging the threat. The regular Metro-Detroiter has no idea.
  - 11y ago
peterbsmith 11y ago
Anyone care to tl;dr this?

49 points by nichodges 11y ago

If Apple doesn't do it or do it properly, someone else will. Who really cares what company ends up making good, safe, reliable electric cars? I think it goes without saying that they're not going to use the same engineering techniques they use for their other software to develop the software for the car. It's not about culture. It'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. As for his past sales figures and argument that people aren't buying electric cars, he misses the point that other than Tesla there are few practical electric cars if any (Leaf's range is too short, Prius isn't an electric car, it's a hybrid, etc.) and the Teslas are priced for the upper class only.

zardo 11y ago
I don't know about airplanes, but cars certainly have their issues. The problem of developing highly reliable software isn't really a solved one. If anything, I think Apple has the advantage of not already being entrenched in an old process.

stcredzero 11y ago

there’s no Moore’s Law for batteries — their “power” doesn’t double every 18 or 24 months. However, industry-wide figures for power density show a clear upward trend. It's not exponential like Moore's law, but in just under a decade or so, electric cars are going to have range parity with gasoline ones. 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.

mikeash 11y ago
It is exponential, actually, it's just that the growth rate is more like 1.05x per year, not the 1.5x per year of Moore's law.
hueving 11y ago
>but in just under a decade or so, electric cars are going to have range parity with gasoline ones. Only if investment and breakthroughs continue. Moore's law worked out well because people kept buying computers constantly since they were useful even while much slower. When it comes to electric cars though, there is little incentive for consumers to buy them at the moment so there is a significant risk of investment petering out.
- stcredzero 11y ago
  Only if investment and breakthroughs continue. Investment and breakthroughs in lithium ion batteries were not and are not only driven by electric vehicles. Far, far from it, as a matter of fact.
  - hueving 11y ago
    What else is the major use case for high-power batteries?

phkahler 11y ago

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.

kozak 11y ago
I live in a climate where you can potentially get stuck in the snow for few hours when going between cities (that happens maybe once per year, but today is exactly such a day, for example). In a gasoline car you would at least stay warm while waiting for the road to be unblocked. With an electric car, this might easily turn into a survival situation.
- gfodor 11y ago
  Being stuck in traffic barely drains the battery. It's range anxiety, not time anxiety.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - beambot 11y ago
    What about running the heater to stay alive and defrosted?
    - recursive 11y ago
      10 horsepower is more than 7 kilowatts of output. I think a typical car heater uses much less than this. Perhaps someone knows more precise figures.

FreedomToCreate 11y ago

Apple is a consumer electronics company. They build focused hardware with software that they patch over time. Cars don'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.

seivan 11y ago
Wifi, two cameras one with a flash, finger-print, GPS, gyro, accelerometer, display, force-sensitive touch displays, sensors for display, cell-reception, in/out microphone ports, co-motion processor, bluetooth, speakers, etc etc. Not to mention a ton of software. Those are several products in one. Wether or not they actually build and design everything themselves is irrelevant. Not all car companies makes everything themselves, most share engines and other parts.
- kunai 11y ago
  Vehicle engineering is on an entirely different scale to a mobile device. Imagine having to engineer all of that for one phone — and then as many times over as it takes to equal the volume of an average car — there you have your engineering challenge. It's a massive undertaking. Musk was able to pull off Tesla because he saw a frontier that needed to be saturated, and has a history of trailblazing through new industries. It's not that Apple can't do it. They'll just have a hard time doing so.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  The complexity is still vastly different with cars than any electronic device Apple builds. All those individual items you list are likely in your future car if not already there buried among a hundred to thousand more such complex items. While Apple may be supply chain wizards in electronics they would need to replicate it many times over to build cars and even then create a whole new distribution and support system. I think their best bet is to be the smarts of all cars, why restrict themselves to just their own cars. Just launching one car would cost them a sizable chunk of their money trying to launch more than one would be many times more difficult, just ask Tesla. Tesla isn't out of the woods because unlike Apple they don't have the reserves to spend; assuming Apple stock holders would go along with the idea of spending tens of billions to start yet another car company. No, I think Apple is better at being another supplier and getting everyone into their game. That gives them more flexibility and more penetration for a lot less. They are likely also the only company that could get their logos on the screens of all cars

iambateman 11y ago

I think people forget Tim Cook's background in supply chain. He is one of the most experienced "process-oriented" managers in the world, backed up by $203 billion in cash, with a reputation for lifestyle products and a strong team. I don't think he has underestimated the challenge.

wmeredith 11y ago
I also thought the point made about innovation in production technology being the main driver of success in the auto industry as something that would be very attractive for Apple. Many, if not most, of their breakthroughs in the last few years have been in hardware manufacturing tech.
ploxiln 11y ago
While that's true, this blog post points out that to make a dent in the market, you need some factories. You can't just have Foxconn assemble your cars with key parts from Samsung. I don't think Apple can pull a rabbit out of a hat with a surprise "special announcement" of an Apple Car, nor can they make a surprise pre-announcement 6 or even 12 months before availability of a car... it's going to be pretty obvious that they're building a car factory a couple years before anyone can buy one. And we don't see that yet.
monk_e_boy 11y ago
For Apple, they must be thinking about cars vs other things. Maybe electric cars are a great idea, but VR maybe a much better idea (seeing as a VR headset is basically two iPohnes glued together)

jobu 11y ago

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

plorkyeran 11y ago
It's making the mistake of dividing their operating loss by number of cars sold and then concluding they're losing that much money for each car they sell.

at-fates-hands 11y ago

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? I still have issues with the environmental impact with electric fuel cell manufacturing and recycling. It'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. Just in case: http://www.theguardian.com/vital-signs/2015/jun/10/tesla-batteries-environment-lithium-elon-musk-powerwall http://www.theguardian.com/vital-signs/2015/jun/10/tesla-bat... 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. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es903729a http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es903729a 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

millstone 11y ago
Err, how would a hydro powered car work, without a battery? > 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” The highest potential for environmental impact among current Li-ion battery chemistries. This chemistry is currently best-in-class for energy storage, but it is an area of very active research. For example, lithium-air batteries hold promise for more energy storage with a carbon cathode. Of course grid power is also moving to renewables.

gfodor 11y ago

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. 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's just due to a single model from a single manufacturer.

saosebastiao 11y ago

Starting from scratch is such a monumental feat. Why wouldn't Apple just use it'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? I'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't even funny. Apple could, with minimal comparative effort (as in, easier than any other company, not easily), 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. 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.

primrosepath 11y ago
Because the auto companies are far, far behind on software and, now in comparison to Tesla, hardware. I was told by a GM employee in their tech center in Warren, they have COBOL running in VMs on modern servers whose terminal screens get scraped into excel spread sheets. This is one of many examples I could give you. I could literally spend hours telling you the horror stories. It's government levels of inefficiencies and leadership has little or no visibility into the system. Everyone in Metro-Detroit knows of the problems in the auto industry. The leadership lacks vision and workers find their niche and retire hoping to do the same things with maybe a promotion to management. There is not a constant drive, at least in the software side of things, to constantly improve and learn like in there is in Silicon Valley. The above is applicable to GM and Ford. Chrysler, on the other hand, is a whole other level of screwed. There's a reason they've been bailed out 2 times by the government and now bought/merged by a foreign car company, AGAIN. Apple, Google, Tesla and Uber will crush all but a few existing automakers, around the globe, and leadership has just now come around to acknowledging the threat. The regular Metro-Detroiter has no idea.
- 11y ago

peterbsmith 11y ago

Anyone care to tl;dr this?