It was only a matter of time before executives from various automakers responded to news that Apple is looking into developing its own electric vehicle. The first responses come from CEOs of Volkswagen, Daimler and Nissan during interviews at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and the Geneva car show this week.
CNET reports that CEO of the Nissan-Renault Alliance Carlos Ghosn responded positively to questions regarding reports of Apple’s electric vehicle project: ”If Apple does it, obviously it’s good news for us,” said Ghosn. ”The fact that a company outside of the auto industry wants to do electric cars is refreshing.” Nissan currently offers its own electric vehicle with the Leaf hatchback.
Daimler Chief Executive Dieter Zetsche (via Reuters) responded to similar questions of Google and other tech companies possibly manufacturing vehicles during this week’s Geneva car show. “Google and the likes want to get involved, I don’t think in the first place to build vehicles,” he said. “We have to understand that, and then to find our roles, to which extent they are complementary, to which extent we become dependent, to which extent we are competitors.” Zetsche previously addressed concerns last month of Apple’s potential electric vehicle plans while downplaying the threat.
That echoes comments from Volkswagen CEO who reportedly also welcomed the news of Apple’s car project as well as Google’s previously announced efforts to get driverless vehicle tech on the roads.
Reports of Apple’s plans to build an electric car first arrived last month. The Wall Street Journal followed up speculation over auto industry hires with claims that Apple had a team of hundreds employees working on an electric vehicle.
We later detailed several key members of the team, many of which joined Apple only recently from Tesla and other automotive related companies.
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Why would CEO’s of Car companies be scared, it is a long way off, they all have or should have electric vehicles now or in the very near future, Apple cars are not gonna be cheap, much like the Tesla isn’t, way out of reach of the normal folk in this world…
However, IF they made an affordable electric car, it would be a good choice as far as there customer service goes, that is 2nd to none…
So now, let me ask a question, if both Apple and Google came up with a car… Which would you buy…??? I can say without a shadow of a doubt, with Googles track record, i would have NOTHING from them, i just don’t trust them…!!!
2020 is not far away
Even if Apple were to take off in the car market it most likely is not going to replace every car marker. Unlike the smart phone and computer market there are more than one or two big players (Win/tel and Apple in the computer space and back in the day BlackBerry and MSFT in the smartphone space).
I would even go so far to say even if the Apple car(s) grabbed 50% of the US market there would still most likely be 4 or more other car makers battling for the remaining US market share.
My guess would be if Apple made a car (not convinced) it would probably target low to middle luxury cars with a target market share of 3% to 5% given that they target premium consumers in all other segments of their product offerings. This is where Daimler, BMW, etc… live currently.
I may be a long way off but, every year the traditional makers sit on their thumbs in regards to electric vehicles puts them two years behind the competition. At some point some of the weaker traditional automakers may start to fail within a decade. The auto industry could accelerate like the cell phone market and we all know what happens to companies like blackberry.
what would the blackberry CEO have said in 2006 at a rumoured mobile phone to produced by apple?
This is a different level altogether in terms of engineering a car, the many components, saftey regualtions etc. But Apple has all the cash in the world to get the right people involved. Developers said 6 years ago that it would be 15 years before chinese companies were producing cars that could be sold in Europe, and yet, here we are with MG models being sold in the UK, manufactured in China and assemebled here.