Apple iCar to be 'interesting'

One of the European car industry’s most dynamic engineering bosses doesn’t believe a move to cars holds any fears for consumer electronics giant Apple.

A curtain of secrecy has been draped over Project Titan and three of Apple’s newly acquired tech centres ahead of a planned 2021 launch, yet Apple has left major carmakers feeling like both ally and prey.

“My expectation is they will put in the market something special like they have been doing for the last 15 years,” Maserati and Alfa Romeo technical chief Roberto Fedeli suggested.

“I think they can be a very interesting actor in the market. They have the capability to development hardware and software. They need only the capability to develop cars.”

Fedeli has had a close relationship with Apple since 2012, when the then-Ferrari tech boss leapfrogged other carmakers to make the Prancing Horse the first to bring CarPlay to a production car.

“We had CarPlay in the Ferrari in 2013, because before that we had the worst infotainment system in the car industry. We went from the worst infotainment to the best,” he admitted.

“Starting from that time we worked very hard with them in order to do a better CarPlay product and we have restarted the collaboration now at Maserati and Alfa Romeo.

“CarPlay will be in all the products in the MY2017 Maserati cars and we are talking about the future with this and it will be for Alfa Romeo in a few months.”

But he is under no illusions that Apple, with a market valuation of about US$590 billion, is focused only on infotainment anymore. Nobody in the car industry is.

BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles have all backed out of tentative alliances with the electronics giant after getting a hint of the scope of Apple’s plans, while it has also held talks with Ford, GM and Audi.

While tail numbers traced to BMW private planes are still regularly seen heading for Cupertino, California, talk of Apple adopting the i3 as the basis for its first branded car has ended.

Instead, the company has poached more than 1000 engineers from across the car industry, with expertise ranging from CNC machining to body-in-white engineering to chassis tuning. Its highest profile hire has been former Aston Martin and Tesla development boss Chris Porritt, though it has heavily plundered Tesla’s senior engineering ranks in the last year.

An Apple shell company, SixtyEight Research, last year leased an 8919 square metre former Pepsi bottling factory in Kifer Road, Sunnyvale, California, just 7km from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, to develop the car program. Sunnyvale is also the site of Daimler’s own secretive research and development laboratory.

It has another large, car-focused site a handful of kilometres away, and another research facility in Berlin, the same city that hosts the HERE digital mapping company bought from Nokia by a joint Audi-BMW-Daimler operation this year.

The secretive brand has registered the domain names apple.car, apple.cars and apple.auto in anticipation of selling a battery-electric car with semi-autonomous capability by 2021 and a fully autonomous production car by 2026.

It has been developing its battery, semi-autonomous and fully autonomous technology in a fleet of Dodge Caravan MPVs, even racking up weeks of testing at the Bay Area’s GoMentum Station, a 2000-hectare former naval base with around 30km of paved roads. (Mercedes-Benz’s Sunnyvale operation also uses the site, and both it and Apple also use another naval base on the Oakland side of San Francisco Bay, where Benz let journalists, including us, drive its F 015 autonomous concept car after unveiling it at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show early last year.)

While it is coy on production volumes as everything else, it hopes to eclipse Tesla and tap into a battery-electric premium market that is set to explode after 2021. Tesla sold around 50,000 electric cars last year, while BMW electrified i brand shared 29,500 sales between its i3 and the i8 hybrid sports car.

“It’s clear they are absolutely doing something different to infotainment,” Fedeli acknowledged.

While revealing nothing, Fedeli would have been closely involved in BMW’s Apple negotiations during his time as one of the leading engineers on i brand.

“From an organizational view, I don’t doubt they can build the hardware, like electric motors, in a very short space of time. They will propose also a very good concept in design and usage of the space inside.”

“The question is what will they need to do to do cars because they don’t have the expertise to do traditional car things like suspensions and handling.”

They didn’t, for sure. It’s hard to definitively say they still don’t.