Although Apple's Apple Car project recently stepped on the brakes and redirected resources towards AI, Apple may still be eager to make cars.
According to Taiwan Electronic Times citing supply chain information, Apple is in talks with a new car manufacturing force in the United States about the possibility of cooperation. However, currently only Apple is known to have negotiated actions, and the outside world cannot know in detail its purpose and the way of cooperation.
Looking at the entire new electric vehicle market in the United States, some companies are nearing the end of mass production hell. The report points out that among them, Rivian has the highest demand for contact with Apple. It is worth noting that Rivian was once seen as a "Tesla opponent".
At present, Rivian's funds are still tight and it is difficult to escape the wave of layoffs, but its cooperation with Amazon in car manufacturing continues. According to reports, the company's visibility of orders in the second half of 2024 is also good.
The report points out that if Apple collaborates with Rivian to install its own software on the Rivian fleet, it is expected to achieve benefits in the shortest possible time: starting with L2+testing, and moving forward with the market's opening up to L3 and higher-level intelligent driving.
After all, in the field of intelligent driving, one of the key still lies in effectively obtaining and utilizing data. Apple's predecessor in car manufacturing, Musk, previously emphasized that high-quality data from excellent drivers is the key to training Tesla's autonomous driving.
Will Apple "copy Huawei homework" on Carplay or other opportunities?
The history of Apple's previous car project, Titan, can be traced back to 2014. For the past decade, the car manufacturing project has been one of Apple's most expensive R&D projects, with an annual R&D investment of around $1 billion. However, the constantly changing project leadership, frequent changes in core team members, and repeated horizontal jumps in the route have resulted in Apple's car manufacturing always "living in the PPT" and making it difficult to go on the production line for mass production.
After a decade of making cars, Apple's most important achievement in the automotive industry is still Carplay - a software service ecosystem built by Cook outside of hardware devices.
After Apple, Google, Huawei, and others have also launched similar in car features, among which Huawei has launched the smart selection mode and collaborated with car manufacturers to provide solutions for the latter.
For Apple, Carplay may become an opportunity to enter the "AI+car" race in the future.
In the automotive field, there are currently three main directions for the deployment of generative AI: first, intelligent voice assistants in smart cabins, and second, simulating various assisted driving scenarios using generative AI; The third is the production and manufacturing of vehicles, as well as various export systems.
The Taiwan Electronic Times pointed out today that Apple has been using Carplay to connect car cabins and widely connect with various car manufacturers. In the future, AI phone functions may enhance rendering in this direction.
Industry insiders point out that the main purpose of mobile phone manufacturers crossing over electric vehicles is to expand applicable data platforms and connect various fields such as mobile phones, home furnishings, and cars; For Apple, expanding the scope of connectivity as much as possible is the best starting point for investing in generative AI.