What it is: The rumored Apple Car is supposedly an electric car project dubbed “Titan.”
If you want to see the future of the Apple Car, look for hints from Apple Music. Before Apple revealed Apple Music, the company had secretly hired notable DJs for an unknown purpose. Later that purpose would be revealed as Beats 1, Apple’s Internet only radio station that plays new music curated by a variety of music experts. The goal of human curated music is to expose new artists to people and get them to buy the digital audio file or pay for a streaming subscription.
Now Apple has been hiring employees from car companies like Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, and even Tesla. Initially there were rumors that Apple was simply trying to develop CarPlay, their in dash entertainment system running on iOS. However the number of car experts Apple keeps hiring indicates that Apple has a bigger project in mind that involves an actual car.
Apple wouldn’t build an ordinary car, but an environmentally friendly one. That’s why everyone thinks the future Apple Car will be an electric car.
It’s not a matter of if Apple will release an electric car but when. Apple has maintained close ties with Tesla and Tesla has even open sourced all their patents which makes them freely available to anyone. That will likely spur the development of electric cars, but the real question is how?
Tesla is already struggling to sell enough electric cars and even those that they do sell are limited by restricted range. With a limited range from batteries and slow recharging, electric cars aren’t better than today’s current batch. What the electric car from Apple needs is longer range, faster recharging, lower cost, direct sales without dealerships, and massive improvements over ordinary cars.
Think of how lousy yesterday’s smartphones were with Blackberry and Nokia phones that the iPhone wiped out. That’s what Apple’s Car must do to wipe out today’s current batch of cars that are expensive, guzzle gas, and cost too much through dealers who try to rip off customers.
Tesla is leading the way of electric cars but Apple is likely following close behind. Tesla is taking the lumps with Apple carefully watching from afar.
The bottom line is that today’s ancient car companies are obsolete. They’re mechanical cars that are as antiquated as Blackberry physical keyboards on smartphones. Wait for Apple Car to appear and you’ll see the Big Three companies (Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler) disappearing faster than Blackberry and Nokia disappeared from the smartphone market.
That’s good news for the rest of the world and bad news for Detroit. If you live in Detroit, be prepared for a second economic collapse. If you thought the collapse of Blackberry in Waterloo, Canada was a tragedy or the implosion of Nokia in Finland wiped out a national economy, wait for Detroit to get wiped out once more by the future Apple Car.
The Apple Car is like a mythical creature that constantly leaves footprints behind. It’s coming sooner than you think. The key to the Apple Car won’t be the mechanical aspect of its construction but its software integration with iOS that will let you control it from an iPhone or iPad or even an Apple Watch.
The Apple Car promises to be a software revolution that will redefine how we think of cars. Until then, watch the Big Three automakers continue introducing incremental improvements every year while they wait for a revolution to wipe them out once and for all.
Read about Tesla’s open source patents and what it means for the future of the electric car.