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Apple Cancels Electric Car Project
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Excellent news, if true. Better to focus on the software that drives the hardware and battery tech. And this could have been the goal all along — the rumor that they were actually going to make a car…was just a rumor. I do see the work and testing that they supposedly did as useful for CarPlay and other tech down the road.
False - far, far more efficient than fossil fuel powered vehicles overall. Not all need "time consuming" charges (mainly lower-end) and battery tech is still rapidly evolving in that space as opposed to fossil fuels which has nothing left to evolve other than continued pollution and waste.
And, yes, they are.
Edit: Just for clarity - EVs are roughly 77 percent efficient with their power source while the best Fossil fuel powered vehicles are at about 20 percent.
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The one in my car is labeled start/stop, not just start. And it turns the car off with one press, you don't have to go through a few menus first.
Same. It seems to me that in general what the folks who are begging for autonomous vehicles really want is just better quality, more ubiquitous, and more insulative public transit.
Most of you don't understand EV's are a complete failure. Everyone "was" moving to them until they realized no one wants them. Apple's trying to get ahead of losing billions to only millions.
This right here is the actual loss we're suffering.What, no more upside down charging and wheels sold separately jokes??
Imagine saying "is it just that apple couldn't innovate and build anything new anymore? less then a month after the Vision Pro went on sale
Sure. But referring to Lithium to argue that EVs are bad for the environment is absurd. EVs are far more energy efficient and don’t pollute while driving. Mining lithium is bad, but no worse than drilling for oil. And car batteries obviously can and need to be recycled.
Burning fossil fuels need to stop. Urgently. That message should be clear by now.
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Anhydrous ammonia is actually a rather clever chemical as a fuel. It may become one of the central parts of hydrogen economy.
Ammonia can be produced from water, air and electricity when there is a surplus of cheap renewable electricity (wind and solar). First large (tens of megawatts) diesel engines have been run with ammonia, and it seems to be a better marine fuel than hydrogen. It may also find use in power generation (when there is no sunshine or wind), as it is easier to store and transport than hydrogen.
Cars? No. Trucks? Probably not.
The Japanese have a fixation on gases for some reason, and they are reluctant to admit they bet the wrong horse by ignoring BEVs. They, however, have some quite clever tech in power-to-X. I just had the opportunity to see a pilot of high-temperature co-electrolysis of CO2 and H2O. In goes electricity, CO2 from burning something, and water. Out comes methane, and the round-trip efficiency is going towards 80 %, which is close to miraculous in P2X.
Toyota made a huge mistake with Mirai (H2 car) and bZ4X (a desperately bad EV, I hope I had the password right). Their latest announcements seem to acknowledge this to some extent.
I imagine Tesla would beg to differ about EVs being a complete failure. I do think other car manufacturers should have leaned harder into hybrids before going all in on electric. Once the infrastructure catches up and battery tech improves a bit more, EVs will be the future in one form or another.
Without stating its cancellation in a 10-K or annual report, or releasing press statements to the fact, Bloomberg is doing nothing but spreading speculation, at best, and disinformation at worst.
As of now there is no press announcement corroborating Bloomberg’s claim. Nothing reported in their SEC filings to date.
I've got a PHEV right now, and it's a decade old. My next car will be BEV. This car was a good compromise as far as what was available for a reasonable price at the time, but I'm seeing used Chevy Bolts for $10k now, a few more years and prices on used Mustangs will be in the range I'm willing to pay.
Hydrogen isn't going anywhere. I think long haul trucks will go BEV, they still have to stop long enough to allow driver rest anyway. For "it must keep moving" with driver swaps it would be as quick to swap a battery or the entire truck cab unit anyway.
Biofuel is probably going to be the answer for jets. It makes a lot more sense than hydrogen or synthetic.
There is no Apple car. There was never an Apple car. There will never be an Apple car.
There was nothing to cancel. At most Apple shut down somebody's pet project that was never going to turn into a product.
The million dollar Apple car would have had perhaps 3 buyers, all of which would have been driven over a cliff by Apple Maps.
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Manufacturing cars is hard and not a major profit machine.
Honestly, I've been thinking about it, and I kinda wonder if they might come back to this at some point. I think they got caught flat-footed on the whole AI thing and the car project was moving so slowly that they realized they really need to move over tons of their existing engineering talent already working on AI systems like self-driving and put that into their other AI endeavors.
They probably came to the realization that full self-driving is further from happening than most people realize because that last 1% hurdle to make it possible anywhere is a much bigger hurdle than most people thought. Remember when Elon kept saying we would have full self driving by 2020? It's now 2024 and it's limited trials of small robo-taxis in a few large cities on select routes, and even those have seen issues. There are also a lot of regulatory legal hurdles to iron out for liability and insurance reasons. Apple usually isn't so early to market with new tech, and I think the industry for this needs to mature more.
So for that reason, it makes sense to move everyone to their other AI projects which may be floundering a bit since they are playing catch-up. That's probably the main reason for this whole thing. They are falling behind on the WWDC updates and management probably had a hard call by the end of February to make on whether they were going to call all hands for help. We'll probably get the announcements but it doesn't really need to be fully ready until September, especially for Siri updates which can be OTA. They could even push it later into the autumn for some of the AI-specific features. But investors will probably not be happy if it slips into 2025.
They probably came to the realization that full self-driving is further from happening than most people realize because that last 1% hurdle to make it possible anywhere is a much bigger hurdle than most people thought. Remember when Elon kept saying we would have full self driving by 2020? It's now 2024 and it's limited trials of small robo-taxis in a few large cities on select routes, and even those have seen issues. There are also a lot of regulatory legal hurdles to iron out for liability and insurance reasons. Apple usually isn't so early to market with new tech, and I think the industry for this needs to mature more.
So for that reason, it makes sense to move everyone to their other AI projects which may be floundering a bit since they are playing catch-up. That's probably the main reason for this whole thing. They are falling behind on the WWDC updates and management probably had a hard call by the end of February to make on whether they were going to call all hands for help. We'll probably get the announcements but it doesn't really need to be fully ready until September, especially for Siri updates which can be OTA. They could even push it later into the autumn for some of the AI-specific features. But investors will probably not be happy if it slips into 2025.
An Apple electric car was always a complete non-starter. Totally outside their core competence, and sucking management time and skills from what Apple actually does best. Glad to see it cancelled. Shame Tim Cook was allowed to waste so much money on it.
There is going to be a geopolitical war.
US: Tesla. Some others trying to do something but nothing really visible, and nothing outside of the US. Tesla has been quite successful even in China.
EU: Several manufacturers (VW shipped the largest number of EVs last year in the EU, more than Tesla) but most of them struggling. VW has horrendous software, Stellantis is just catching on, BMW, and M-B are too premium to be important. VW has traditionally been strong in China, but VW's BEVs are fading away in the face of domestic competition.
China: Several manufacturers, BYD the largest in the world. New models are cropping up almost every week, quality is improving fast, and the price level is significantly lower than that of western manufacturers. Probably heavily subsidised, likely part of China's plan of data domination (a.k.a. spying). Gaining market share in the EU, the US is next.
I seldom agree with certain Mr. Musk, but this is an exception. If we do not do something about the influx of Chinese EVs, we may be in