Tesla has proven traditional automakers wrong. Its success told everyone that Silicon Valley (where Tesla is headquartered) can outdo Detroit and every other country in the world at building a hot product, even without a long-term expertise in auto manufacturing. If a relative newcomer like Tesla could do it, then surely a tech giant like Apple could blow everyone away.
Apple's car project quietly bit the dust this February, after reportedly sinking tens of billions of dollars into it each year, poaching countless automotive talent, building prototypes that never saw the light of day, and enduring a decade of relentless speculation.
Apple Backs Out; Huawei and Xiaomi Take First Steps
With the EV market set to become even more brutal this year, Apple's pivot to generative AI suggests that for a tech company, building cars is a wild goose chase. Maybe Apple was right to pull the plug. After all, after spending tens of billions over a decade, it had nothing to show for it.
So, at the very least, it was a fiscally responsible decision.
Apple Pulls the Plug on Its Car
Apple’s two direct rivals in China, however, have successfully launched cars—smartphone giants Huawei and Xiaomi.
Huawei’s vehicle brand, AITO, is riding high as the top-selling new-energy vehicle brand in China thanks to its feature-rich and competitively priced electric and hybrid SUVs.
Xiaomi’s SUV, the S7, runs on the same HyperOS system as Xiaomi’s phones, theoretically enabling seamless connectivity between home, car, and mobile—something Western and other Asian automakers can only dream of today.
What do these two brands have that Apple doesn’t? And where Apple has failed, how have Huawei and Xiaomi succeeded? The answer, multiple experts said, is complicated.
An Apple Car Just Doesn’t Make a Lot of Sense for Apple
One fact has become clear as the media and analysts dissect Apple’s car project: cars are hard. Arguably the hardest part of making one might be making the thing itself.
Today’s automobiles are brought to market with the help of suppliers and third-party components. Even Tesla, which is the leader in terms of vertical integration, still uses components from outside companies. It took Tesla more than a decade to reach its current level of vertical integration.
Apple’s product line, however, is famously closed. The tech company is one of the most vertically integrated companies on the planet. To successfully and quickly create a car while staying true to this model would be a very, very tall order.
Apple’s dreams, said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst for Guidehouse Insights’ mobility practice, don’t match the reality of what they’d get out of a car.
“I think Apple probably said, you know, if we just build a traditional car, we’re probably never going to sell enough of them at a high enough margin to make it worthwhile,” Abuelsamid said. “You have all the hassles of creating a supply chain, manufacturing, retail, support, customer support, vehicle service.”
The car business is typically a pretty low-margin business, thanks to high overhead and labor costs, a cyclical buying trend, and fierce competition—something Apple, which owns roughly 60% of the U.S. smartphone market, isn’t used to.
"If you look at Apple as a business, everything they do is high-margin products," Abuelsamid said. "They have 35% to 40% gross margins on hardware products. Anything that's low margin they're not going to bother with because they can get enough customers and revenue from their high-margin products."
Tesla is one of the most profitable companies in the industry, with gross margins around 18% on its lineup. For Apple to eclipse those figures, it'll likely need to either create a new business model or integrate some kind of groundbreaking technology.
That could be why Apple's initial "Project Titan" efforts centered on autonomous driving technology. Self-driving cars, Abuelsamid said, would allow Apple to sell more of a service than a product, creating the kind of recurring revenue stream the tech giant loves.
"My guess is [Apple] wants to have a self-driving electric vehicle that's offered on a subscription basis," Abuelsamid said. "Because it's autonomous and likely to be fairly limited in geographic reach for the foreseeable future, [Apple] could offer it in markets where they think there's enough affluent consumers willing to pay a premium for a mobility service."
苹果汽车：革命还是炒作？
对于特斯拉对未来做出的雄心勃勃承诺，苹果的自动驾驶汽车技术却未能取得类似成功。
尽管投入了数十亿美元并挖走了该领域顶尖人才，但至少对于苹果来说，它从未成为一个可行的产品。
汽车行业分析师雷·兴（Lei Xing，音译）对阿布勒萨米德的批评表示赞同。他通过电子邮件表示：“苹果推出的从 iPhone、iPod、Vision Pro 到 iPad 的每款设备都旨在颠覆市场上现有的产品或商业模式。”
苹果汽车：缺乏创新
那么苹果的汽车是否会带来颠覆性的创新？它的创新方法会比传统汽车制造商、初创电动汽车制造商或自动驾驶公司早先所做的有所不同吗？
可能不会，这是雷·兴和他 Sino Auto Insights 的分析师同事杜乐（Tu Le，音译）的共识。
杜乐表示：“他们可能只能提供中国电动汽车公司已在中国市场提供的某些功能。”在中国，许多电动汽车已实现互联和半自动，而苹果的汽车可能只具备相对较少的此类功能。
他补充道：“特斯拉也感受到了这种压力。”“蔚来、小鹏和理想都已推出各自版本的全自动驾驶汽车，而特斯拉仍然只提供半自动驾驶汽车，特斯拉在中国市场正被淘汰出局。”
中国电动汽车的系统与中国其他科技行业紧密联系。与典型的苹果 CarPlay 相比，这些汽车的集成方式更具包容性，从而带来更全面的体验。例如，消费者可以在车内连接 YouTube 和 Amazon。此外，蔚来于 2018 年推出的 NOMI 助手是一款基于人工智能的虚拟助手。尚不清楚苹果是否能够在这些方面超越中国在创新方面的优势。
汽车制造商对与苹果合作持观望态度
阿布勒萨米德表示：“据我所知，没有一家传统汽车制造商对与苹果合作特别感兴趣，因为他们不想助长一个潜在的、实力更强的竞争对手。”
相比之下，华为的成功源于它与真正成熟的汽车制造商协同合作的能力。与本田成立的合资企业 Afeela 就是一个很好的例证。同样地，华为也热衷于成为供应商，并与多家中国品牌建立了合作伙伴关系。华为与赛力斯的合作可能是最成功的，双方共同推出了 AITO 品牌。
不过，合作不一定是在电动汽车领域取得成功的唯一途径。尽管北京汽车集团将负责组装新 SU7，但小米选择自行完成大部分开发工作。从规格上看，这款车极具竞争力。自研引擎似乎非常强大，其电池车身一体化技术以及“超级压铸”技术似乎融合了当今汽车制造领域的所有最佳理念。然而，总体而言，SU7 的规格或风格并不像传闻中的苹果全自动驾驶汽车那样引人注目。
但真的有必要那样吗？雷·兴认为没有必要，因为小米的目标与苹果不同，并且一直如此。雷·兴表示：“小米试图证明它可以制造电动汽车，并将其整合到现有人-车-家产品生态系统中，而苹果试图开发一款颠覆性的设备，因此两者在战略上是不同的。”
Xiaomi and Huawei might have compromised a little on perfection in order to get a product out first. When you add in the consumer patriotism for Huawei and Xiaomi, and that both brands are willing to accept inherently lower margins, it starts to make sense how Xiaomi’s and Huawei’s car projects are on the road while Apple’s isn’t.
Impressive as that is, both brands are not out of the woods yet. Huawei’s AITO sub-brand is looking promising, with fairly strong sales figures the last couple of months. Xiaomi, on the other hand, will enter an EV price war that is currently at its most cutthroat in China. But still, Xiaomi has a car on the road, which is a lot further than Apple has come.
The Xiaomi SUV7 will officially launch on March 28; the Apple Car will not.
