Apple

At this point the fact that Apple is working on an electric vehicle is all but confirmed. Recent reports show that Apple is searching for a private road-testing site, they hired hundreds of workers with automotive industry experience and the company is even allegedly in talks with BMW to license some technology. Officials within Apple have yet to confirm the ambitious new product, but CEO Tim Cook acknowledged that the automobile industry is ripe for disruption and it is difficult to imagine them backing out at this point.

The electric car is reportedly codenamed ‘Project Titan’ and it is indeed a project of titanic proportions. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently made some comments warning the Cupertino company of the complexity of manufacturing cars. Those comments were surprisingly met by mockery from a lot of Apple fans. I think Apple can and will make an electric vehicle, but I’d like to put the project into perspective.
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Speaking today on CNBC, Ferrari chairman and Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne spoke affirmatively when asked if he believes Apple will make a car. The Ferrari boss explained that he believes the automobile space is one in which Apple can exhibit its skills, clarifying that he believes Apple will have a car assembled rather than building it on their own. Marchionne added that Apple has not approached Fiat for being its partner for assembling a car.
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 Yesterday Apple CEO Tim Cook was at the Wall Street Journal Digital Live conference for an interview and he talked about the company’s take on innovation in the car industry:

“When I look at the automobile, what I see is that software becomes an increasingly important part of the car of the future. You see that autonomous driving becomes much more important. It seems like there will be massive change in that industry. We want people to have an iPhone experience in their car. We look at a lot of things. Our model is to reduce that list to a few. We will see what we do in the future. I do think that industry is at an inflection point for massive change, not just evolutionary change.”

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San Francisco-based Mission Motorcycles, a maker of high-end electric motorcycles, recently filed for bankruptcy amid financial troubles. In the filing, current CEO Mark Seeger said the company is so low on cash that it can’t afford to pay for an attorney for the bankruptcy process, but while recently talking with Reuters, former CEO Derek Kaufman dismissed the company’s lack of money and instead blamed Mission’s demise on Apple’s poaching of top engineers.
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Stephen Colbert, on his popular Late Nite television show, discussed the Tesla V7 software update and the ability of the car to “drive itself”. Colbert noted driving his Tesla into Manhattan and how the autopilot would improve that. Additionally he noted that a lot of billionaires are working on self driving cars including Google’s founders and guests Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tesla CEO Elon Musk of course and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

The spot was a great one for Tesla, shining a light on its ability to upgrade cars through software and  putting a very positive and funny spin on autonomous driving. Watch the video clip on Youtube below:
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Media organisations will be disappointed to learn that Tesla CEO Elon Musk plans on cutting back on media appearances. In the past week, Musk mentioned on two occasions, on the Marketplace report and at the New Establishment Summit, that he wishes to reduce time spent on “press stuff” from “2 or 3 percent” of his time to only 1%.

We did the math. 1% of 24 hours is roughly 15 minutes a day or 100 minutes a week – assuming Musk includes sleep in his time.

The CEO says that he already spends most of his time on engineering and design, but he plans to use the time freed up by making less media appearances to focus even more on the products.
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Yesterday we reported on comments made by Tesla CEO Elon Musk during a recent interview with German newspaper Handelsblatt. The CEO, known for speaking his mind candidly on occasions, made comments that could easily have been interpreted as critical to the design of the Apple Watch and the quality of the company’s hires from Tesla, but Friday afternoon Musk took to Twitter to soften those comments.
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Apple’s so-called “poaching war” with Tesla has been a hot topic for the company’s CEO Elon Musk and in a recent interview, Musk fired even more shots at Apple. Speaking to German newspaper Handelsblatt, Musk voiced his lack of concern regarding Apple’s tendency to hire Tesla engineers and executives. Musk recently finished a trip around Europe, speaking with politicians and Tesla employees.

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Apple has reportedly hit the gas on its plans to launch an electric car codenamed Project Titan and added another 1,200 employees to the development team, according to the Wall Street Journal. The team working on the electric vehicle has now tripled in size. The reason behind the push? Apple wants to finalize the project in 2019, a full year ahead of the originally-reported 2020 production date.

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The Guardian is reporting that Apple legal representatives met with California’s department of motor vehicles to discuss regulations about self-driving cars. On record, the DMV told The Guardian that “the Apple meeting was to review DMV’s autonomous vehicle regulations”. This news follows reports that Apple is searching for a private road-testing site for its ‘Apple Car’ electric vehicle project.

More interestingly, The Guardian claims to have obtained documents that suggest the Apple Car is close to leaving the lab as the project deemed ‘Project Titan’ has now an official Engineering Program Manager. When a project gets an EPM, it typically means a product is entering the next stage of development and finishing testing stages.

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The Chinese auto giant Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co, through its Beijing Electric Vehicle Co subsidiary, opened a research and development center in Silicon Valley. The center will be dedicated to electric vehicle research.

In its current “launch phase”, the R&D center has just over 20 employees and the company expects them to develop “4 to 6 models per year”.
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Apple and BMW have engaged in negotiations over Apple’s interest in using BMW’s i3 electric cars as a basis for its own electric car project, according to a new report from German publication…

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Apple’s car team

Speculation regarding Apple’s plans to build an electric car has been at an all-time over recent months. Earlier this year, we broke down the team that Apple has assembled to work on its car, several members of which were poached from Tesla. In Tesla’s Q1 2015 earnings call, however, CEO Elon Musk commented on Apple’s alleged electric car plans and the poaching war that has been ongoing between the two companies.

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Samsung has acquired the battery pack business of leading automotive parts supplier Magna International. The move, according to a statement from the companies, will “enhance Samsung SDI’s capabilities in batteries for electric vehicles.”

While Samsung producing batteries and energy storage solutions for vehicles isn’t exactly new—it already supplies batteries for Tesla and others—there is an Apple Car connection in its latest acquisition…
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Tesla’s Model S (or a wrecked one) got the IHS Supply teardown treatment and if you are wondering what makes the car tick, it is a worthy watch/read (PDF). Notably Tesla “really wanted to do things differently and employed virtual controls—rather than physical knobs and buttons—to take over the user experience. This approach required a major investment in big displays and touch panels, similar to the approach Apple took when designing the iPhone and iPad.”

It is no secret the NVidia processor runs the display and the center stack. Other notables:

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I kid you not. Bloomberg:

The charger connectors, which tether Tesla-issued cables to wall outlets, will be mailed out in the next two weeks, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said in an interview today.

“These are very rare events, but occasionally the wiring isn’t done right,” Musk said. “We want people to have absolute comfort, so we’re going to be providing them with an upgraded adapter.”

Tesla fell 2.6 percent to $143.72 at 12:20 p.m.

Tesla also upgraded the Model S firmware last month to prevent cars from drawing too much power from inadequate wiring.

At first blush, you might be thinking (as I had) that this is silly. My house is wired properly so I shouldn’t ever have issues like the person in California whose garage caught on fire after a short in the wiring in November.

But what if you go to a vacation rental or visit the family/relatives for a weekend. Can you be sure that the electrician that did their wiring was competent?

Good on Tesla for covering this; ‘Short sighted’ on investors for seeing this as a sign of weakness and not strength.

Update: Press release follows:
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Tesla seems to be joining many other Silicon Valley companies in hiring employees away from Apple. Only weeks after poaching Apple Mac Hardware Vice President Doug Field to run Vehicle Design, we have discovered that Tesla has made another notable hire from the Cupertino tech giant: Rich Heley. He was hired away from Apple in November and joined Tesla in that same month, according to his LinkedIn profile:

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Not much not to like here.  How does $27,500 go for a $199/month lease? Add in the $7500 tax credit.  I’ll be interested to see how low that 82 mile range gets in the winter – oh you can only get on in California and Oregon which have mild winters so we’ll have to wait awhile and see.
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