Love them or hate them, you do have to admit that Apple is an incredibly influential company which can often revolutionize a specific product category. As one of the most profitable companies in the entire world, Apple can afford to spend a lot of money on research and development. They’ve always stuck to producing technology products for consumers, but will they actually product a car? Based on the rumors that are out there, that might very well be the case.
Rumors surrounding the alleged Apple Car have been flying around for some time now, but it’s always been unclear as if they are true or not. First we heard about Apple poaching engineers from Tesla Motors and Volkswagen, offering them large salaries and bonuses to come work for them. Then Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, mentioned on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert that Apple was in fact, working on a self-driving car. This certainly got a lot of people excited, and now the Wall Street Journal has reported that not only is the Apple Car a “committed project”, but they have designed an electric prototype already, they’re increasing the amount of people working on the car, and they plan to launch the car sometime in 2019. While Apple is great at keeping secrets and there’s no official word just yet, all of the signs point towards the technology giant producing a car.
On paper it seems strange for Apple, a technology company, to develop a car. They have relatively no experience in the automobile industry at all. However it’s not entirely unheard of for a tech company to develop a car. Google has been testing self-driving cars for sometime now, so there’s no reason why Apple couldn’t do the same. Given the fact that they have a market value of around $650 billion dollars, they certainly have the money to afford it. So why is this important, and what would an Apple car be like?
While one could argue that Apple has fallen off somewhat as a focal industry leader, they have created many revolutionary new products in the past. Before the first iPhone was released, there weren’t really any other devices quite like it, but the iPhone set the standard for the future of smartphones. The same could be said of the original iPod and iTunes. Those products changed the music industry as a whole. So would it be hard to imagine the Apple Car be similar?
Apple is all about cultivating a great user experience that’s delivered in high-end hardware. All of their products, from their laptops to tablets, feel like premium devices. It would be safe to imagine that their alleged car would be similar. If they do release a self-driving vehicle in 2019, it could very well change the automobile industry. However it will not be easy, given fierce competition from Tesla, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and other car manufactures that are paving the way for self-driving vehicles. But as Tesla has shown us, a car can be more about technology than ever before. Apple can use what it knows about technology to craft a car unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. I doubt it would be cheap, but it would be extremely important as not many companies have dived so far outside their primary industries of operation.
Still, it remains to be seen if Apple will actually produce a car at all. Maybe they’re just working on some sort of car operating system. However given all these rumors and reports that have come out recently, it wouldn’t be completely strange to thing that they are making a car. It takes a long time for a company to bring a new vehicle to market, especially when that company has never made a car before. A company like Apple could theoretically design, create, test, and release a car in that time frame, but it would definitely be tough. For the time being, we will have to wait and see if Apple will make a car, but the signs are pointing towards a “yes”.
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