I'm not sure what Apple would bring to cars. Waymo is almost uncatchably far ahead in self-driving. Tesla has already brought minimalism to cars, and will probably have an affordable car with mass appeal by 2028 if BYD doesn't get there first. Apple might be better off making a luxury fifth wheel.
The world's first non-repairable car. Minor fault, major accident, or inevitably-degraded battery? No problem!, just throw it away and buy the latest model, like you would with a phone or tablet! You wanted an upgrade anyway, didn't you?
(Meanwhile, Apple will keep boasting about their green credentials...)
What about consumables?... You'll still be able to change the tyres, brake bads, and wiper blades. But Apple will take 30% from every sale/service of these items, and the vehicle won't start if you install non-genuine-Apple replacements. (And then there's the chargers... don't expect to be able to put electricity into that battery without Apple getting their god-given 30% cut)
Starting at $99,999 for the base model (50 miles range). A maxxed-out model will do 750 miles, but they're really going to make you pay for those battery up-sells, and the well-glued-in battery pack is non-upgradeable after purchase.
Aren't they cheaper than the Ford F150 'Lightning' (electric version, so comparable)? Or is that also 'hyper-luxury'? (Genuine question, I suppose I'm not really familiar enough to know what the top end would be, maybe that's it, I know Lamborgini makes a tractor, but I'm not aware of a 'supertruck'.)
A Rivian R1T with dual motor and the large battery pack (352 mile range) is $79,000. An F-150 Lightning with the extended range battery (>300 mile range) is between $69k and $77k.
Both have cheaper trims available, but the cheapest Lightning is significantly less expensive than the cheapest R1T.
Both are really nice trucks too, especially at the higher trim. I don't see a big difference in luxury between an F-150 Platinum and the R1T.
Ah ok, I had them the wrong way around then (I didn't mean much cheaper), but pretty comparable - if you were in the market you might probably be looking at both.
But it's all subjective I suppose, maybe they meant that either would be 'hyper-luxury', I'm not that familiar, I just thought F150s were quite commonplace. (Not here in the UK, no such trucks are, but from what I've seen in North America.)
Yeah, I definitely think people cross shop them. I've seen former R1T owners that would consider a Lightning.
The F-150 in general is a little complicated on this scale. They are absolutely commonplace (the #1 selling vehicle in the US!) and the base model for the gas version is "only" ~$34k. But the price range is immense, and it isn't particularly uncommon to see >$60k King Ranch versions either. Higher price trims are available too, but tbh, I don't see them as often. Maybe occasionally a Raptor (~76k).
As it says, while there are horror stories, there are also non-horror stories.
I've seen a similar fender-bender (i own a rivian, so do some neighbors) get quoted at 3-4k.
Honestly, 40k seems more like "we don't want to do this job" than "it really costs this much".
Given the PDR took 3 days to do it, I can understand the perspective of a body shop that doesn't want to do the job - they can probably get done 150k worth of jobs in the same time period.
So if you're going to have minor bumps result in a repair bill more expensive than many cars, it's not that much of a stretch to say that'd make it virtually unrepairable.
Interesting! But may have actually not have been sealed.
The Wikipedia page says:
“ The bonnet was widely rumoured to be sealed – Car and Driver wrote: "...feature of the A2 that may foretell the future: the sealed hood". Actually, the bonnet is easily removed, being held in place by two twist-lock catches. The bonnet, weighing 8 kg, then comes away from the car altogether, unlike the usual hinged flip-up arrangement on most other cars. Due to the service hatch, the bonnet does not need to be removed frequently for access to the engine.”
The world's first non-repairable car. Minor fault, major accident, or inevitably-degraded battery? No problem!, just throw it away and buy the latest model, like you would with a phone or tablet! You wanted an upgrade anyway, didn't you?
No big deal. Just buy the AppleCar AppleCare plan.
In my limited experience the TCO for Apple computer products seems lower than equivalent PC products. A MacBook I can reasonably expect to stay in the same condition until like 7-10 years later. With a regular windows laptop the screen would be flickering, the keyboard would be worn down, and it would overheat intermittently.
I can open my 2012 MacBook Air right now and expect it to work just fine.
Apple's phones have about 7 years of first-party support / guaranteed useful life, compared with the rest of the industry's standard of maybe 2. Yeah I'd never buy a car that will only be good for 7 years, but let's see what they ship.
I'm pretty sure there is no such "guarantee". You can definitely Apple has a track record of supporting 7 years and I have absolutely no problem with that. Samsung and Google actually say they are committed to 7 years of support for the latest phones in their official document.
Also the rest of the industry is not 2. 3 years is very common these days for phones, 5 getting more common. And for computers... Many business computers are supported for a long time, and Windows is famous for its backwards compatibility and support (Windows 10 is supported till 2025, 10 years from its release).
Yes, I speculate and draw my conclusions based on my most recent experience (2017-2019) with Android. I'm glad it's improving, but I'm not in a hurry to "experience" Android again.
The batteries don't have 7 years of useful life, though. And replacing them is made intentionally difficult to encourage people to just upgrade instead.
A lot of people don't live near an Apple store, and few people are prepared to be without their phone while mailing it off for a battery swap.
They have a program for independent repair companies. It doesn't pass Louis Rossmann's bar since it doesn't let him do board-level repair, but none of the "fix your screen/replace your battery" shops I've ever seen do that anyway, so it would be fine for them.
Well, I'm yet to buy a car in my life (viva la public transport), so there's a realistic chance I don't know what I'm talking about, but I can imagine the 4-5 years cycle largely depends on the resale value.
Apple products can have a hit&miss resale value; I think the 2015-2019 line of MacBooks were bad value at any time and any price point, and will be avoided well into the future. Hence my speculation: let's see what they ship this time.
Well I guess that's one reason why I seem to be incompatible with car ownership. When COVID hit, I continued to pay for my public transport ticket even while I couldn't even use it, because I wanted to throw in my share towards keeping the system alive and as good as it is.
> compared with the rest of the industry's standard of maybe 2.
You're just making up facts to protect your beloved brand/cult. C'mon. All my non-Mac computers I'm using here have been around way longer than two years.
You're talking about different things. Apple officially supports / provides software updates for its iPhones for 7 years. Other phone manufacturers' durations of support vary, but they're usually much less. Until fairly recently, Google provided 3 years of software updates for Pixels, for example. [1]
Samsung accounts for the vast majority of Android phones in actual use. Their current policy is also 7 years, as is Google's. You're right that historically this was different, but things change.
Here's objective facts and my experiences that I used to draw my conclusions.
My final Android phones were: [1] a Samsung A7 (2017), which included a non-replaceable battery, shipped with Android 6 (2015), officially supported Android 8 (2017; theoretical first-party security patches which it never received were offered until 2021), no longer receives updates even from LineageOS, and never ran postmarketOS; and [2] a Nokia 3 (2017), which had pretty much the same story (support ended on Android 9).
In 2019, someone gave me an old, smashed [3] iPhone 7 (2016), and the phone literally worked better than any Android phone I've owned before, including either of the two above. Since it was already physically falling apart, I took the liberty of getting [4] an iPhone SE (2020), which is still with me; the 7 continued to serve in the family for a couple more years.
> All my non-Mac computers I'm using here have been around way longer than two years.
I have a 2002 TiBook, which, believe me or not, continues to outlive my T61 and X200. My MBP (2017) had a spicy pillow though (which Apple repaired for free, outside of warranty).
> [...] to protect your beloved brand/cult.
I'm not a cultist, I'm a pragmatist. I used to believe in things - I had a [5] Jolla (2013) for the longest time, because I believed in Free Software and Open Source and all that stuff, until I realized suffering for your values is not necessarily the healthiest thing to do, and that freedom is not strictly a function of a software license, but of things the hardware+software enables you to do with it.
You refer to your smart phone as a non-mac computer? Because nobody is talking about Mac's besides you. Or PC's. Or "computers" outside of smart phones in general.
I certainly wouldn't call that minimalistic. Do you mean the exterior surface? The controls, UI, etc. are complex and difficult. People can even open the door the first time they ride in one. The big screen and all its software are not minimalistic.
> People can even open the door the first time they ride in one
Found an iPhone in the snow on Sunday. Had to google how to unlock it / get contact information. "swipe up" it said on the screen. Nothing happened. It was a lie. You need to "swipe from the bottom of the screen". Not intuitive at all.
Tesla's hardware certainly is minimalistic though, and hence the Apple analogy. The software inside an iPhone is ferociously complicated, but the slab of glass, no buttons form factor is much simpler than the Nokias etc it replaced.
The difference is that Tesla's hardware is simpler in a way that's harder to use. Moving from indirect control to touch screens was great and intuitive for phones. Moving to touch screens in cars is more about cost savings than making them easy to use.
If a touchscreen was the ideal way to interact with a car, why aren't acceleration and braking done through the touch screen? Why isn't steering on the touch screen?
> Moving from indirect control to touch screens was great and intuitive for phones
This isn't even necessarily true for phones. Back when I got the early iPhone and iPad for my parents, one thing that they loved about it is the physical Home button - because, no matter where you were in the UI, even if you ended up "lost" (e.g. by accidentally fullscreening some app), you could always escape to a familiar place by pressing that obvious button.
Fast forward a few years, and it all gets replaced by completely unintuitive swipes. They were not happy, to put it mildly.
You accelerate, brake, indicate etc all the time, so you need tactile controls for those functions, and Teslas do. But how do you find a Spotify playlist, adjust how you're notified if you exceed the speed limit and the margin you want, or check tire pressure readings with tactile controls?
You can argue that this gets too unwieldy once the UI gets more complicated. But if the UI is too complicated to be navigable with arrow keys, I would say that it's too complicated for a dashboard of a fast moving vehicle.
FWIW touch itself is not really a problem. Sometimes it is indeed more convenient. But when you can only e.g. adjust volume using touch, that becomes much more difficult to do while driving. Same thing goes for navigation and other such things. A good dashboard UX will let you do this using both touch and dedicated physical buttons.
It's minimalistic, as far as is possible in a vehicle. The best part is no part, the even better part is one you never have to think about. I don't have to turn my car on or off, don't have to change the oil, don't have to think about headlights or wipers, don't have to fiddle with climate control. The car is designed around being driven and nothing else.
There's been a long term trend in Apple hardware of simplification (removal of buttons, ports, flourishes, etc.). The iPhone was a big jump in that direction from the Blackberry, but I can't imagine an Apple Car being that different from a Tesla/Rivian/BYD one.
If minimalism means intuitive, I no longer find the android/ios ui minimalistic either. They've gone to a system of gestures that aren't particularly intuitive.
Ahhh, the true reasoning for the wheels experiment. Apple has always had a thing about round. Maybe Apple Wheels (TM) will have finally perfected round that all other manufactures have been unable to solve.
> Never had an issue with after-sales support. My 2nd Tesla in 5 years.
Sorry but you probably are not the target market for the Apple Car.
Many premium-market customers (early Model S/X, current Plaid shoppers) have moved to other brands such as Rivian, Lucid, and Porsche due to Tesla’s “cheapness” and abysmal customer service.
But sure, if you’re coming from a Toyota RAV4 or BMW 3 series, Tesla is great. But don’t expect to be the target demographic for a $100K+ Apple car.
The Internet is full of disaster stories about everything. In the actual Consumer Reports ranking Tesla is far from the bottom. It's almost exactly in the middle, between Infiniti and Cadillac.
For a car that is, as Tesla fans like to point out, "far simpler than an ICE, with a lot less that can possibly go wrong", being in the "middle of the pack" with ICEs is actually pretty damning.
Nitpicking everything Musk-related is one of the biggest drivers of content on multiple social media platforms. Using the general trends of those sites that you've gleened from headlines to make generalizations is probably a bad idea.
There is huge, huge demand for a negative spin on everything and like we've seen a ton of times on the internet, if you say something exaggerated enough times it starts becoming the accepted truth.
And the world is full of Teslas. You really think if even 20% of the hyperbole was true that they'd be shipping the volume they are? All those Tesla buyers are just deluded marks who'd be happier in a VW or whatever?
Maybe... the situation is complicated and like all manufacturers they have some good points and some bad points and the market is in the process of deciding on what particular traits it values?
My one experience with after-sales support has been fantastic.
1. Set an appointment on the Tesla app
2. The day before the appointment my rep from the service center calls me to see if I have any questions about the process.
3. Take the car in, they immediately give me a loaner Tesla of the exact same make and model. When I get in the loaner car, it already has all my preferences imported (Signed in to Apple Music/Podcasts, seat settings, Joe Mode, Phone is the key, etc..)
4. A few days later, I get a notification from the app telling me my car is ready to pick up.
5. I drive the loaner to the service center. The app tells me to park it anywhere.
6. The app shows me where my car is parked.
7. I get in my car and drive away, without having to talk to anyone.
8. Bonus: My car has been detailed
9. Cost: $0.00
This is obviously anecdotal and I'm sure people have had bad experiences. But I was really impressed!
You're right, the screen could just be too expensive to replace rather than break easily. The only data I need for my assessment is the price and lack of freedom. I once did an experiment with my friend who's a die-hard fan. We both turned on bluetooth on all our devices, his iphone and macbook and my android and Windows. I saw both of his, he saw none of mine. Disgusting, why would anyone pay for that?
It’s easy to say that now but at the time there were obvious huge obstacles to Apple doing a great cell phone.
And not just technical; the business relationships between cellular network owners, handset manufacturers, and software companies was totally different. Apple essentially had to restructure the industry to make the iPhone what it is today.
I suspect a car would need to have a similar impact in order for Apple to succeed. They would need to launch a new kind of product that just happens to have the shape of a car.
> Someone in 2006 asked what Apple would bring to the cellphone market, too.
And that would be a fair question. The iPhone never did anything others weren't already doing, nor has Apple ever done that in recent history. They sell products not because they're better, but because they've convinced people Apple is cool.
> They sell products not because they're better, but because they've convinced people Apple is cool.
That's not why I buy Apple products. I buy them because their build quality is impeccable, their software for the most part "just works" (ok they've gotten worse in this regard lately), and all their stuff works together. Having date move magically between my devices without doing anything is really compelling.
You seem to have confused not paying attention with nothing happening. The carrier relationship was completely different for iPhone users, starting with how you didn't need carrier approval to put something in the App Store.
I think you underestimate how bad the competition has usually been. Apple is bad but the competition is usually terrible. Tech stuff has always had a pretty low bar, especially for actually working without a huge amount of sysadmin.
Tesla has been setting fire to their brand, mostly by their CEO acting out. Apple has the affordable-luxury design chops to leap to the head of the class, as they did with the watch. Phone and Siri integration, plus I'm sure their product teams would come up with a bunch of great stuff. Maybe it's Apple Car built by BYD.
Elon's antics are wrecking Twitter, but Tesla is chugging along nicely all the same. Most of the world doesn't follow or care about Silicon Valley CEO drama in the same way that we here on HN do.
Right now people are following along because Tesla is the market leader and they see the cars on the street, but they rely heavily on media and word of mouth for marketing. I think they're very vulnerable to an Apple marketing blitz, but it sounds like it's not happening, so it's all hypothetical.
A few years ago I saw frequent signs from my social set that Tesla was considered a great innovator and a really cool company. The news has not been good the last year, and I haven't heard any sentiments like that in a while.
FWIW I cancelled Tesla order because of Musk. Wouldn't be caught dead driving one after the unhinge that keeps unfolding (and that is also very easy to pick up in the mainstream news).
Anecdata: I know multiple people who are intending to buy an EV for their next car, and all of them have removed Tesla from their list of possible purchases because of the CEO's behavior over the last couple of years.
And sure, maybe I live in a "woke bubble", but that's a bunch of revenue that would almost certainly have ended up with Tesla that's now going elsewhere.
And I know multiple rural people (who disagree with you on everything) who either have bought or are planning to buy Tesla vehicles because they're now affordable and really really good.
Also, people who already own Teslas aren't going anywhere. Immense brand loyalty for good reason.
I don't dispute that Teslas are a good car. I can definitely see why people would like to buy one, and indeed the people I know who intended to buy one did so because it was a good car. There are some issues, sure, but on balance I'm sure there are many happy customers.
I don't see them becoming more affordable though: it looks to me like both Model 3 and Model Y prices are high, and in fact they're only staying still because Tesla is removing features from the low-end configurations.
If it was about ethics then the signal wouldn’t come from prominence in the media (do you scrutinize ceos of your everyday products, tesla is an org far beyond Elon, etc).
You tell me what the EV landscape would look like today had Tesla not succeeded, and whether that delta is really of equal worth to someone's purportedly painful experiences using a microblogger.
That's a terrible argument. Putting aside that no one can possibly know that, you seem to be under the impression that Tesla Motors invented something revolutionary. All they did was put lithium batteries in an electric car and slapped an iPad in it. Pretty cool, but there's nothing they've done that any other car company couldn't have done from day one. Everything else they've done has been a gimmick, but their promise is that these vehicles can drive themselves and make everyone money by working as taxis, and if that never happens (which looks inevitable now), then all they are is a car company, and plenty of other car companies make EVs now.
Apple's MO is to make a premium version of a product and sell a huge quantity of them, and ideally it's a new product category.
Right now there IS a category of vehicle that we don't have in the USA, the cheap small electric cars that have taken over in China.
I could see semi-plausible arguments for mass adoption of those in the USA, as secondary cars for short errands and beginner drivers, and if they were cheap.
But Apple's move is to sell the nicest, most expensive version of a product. It's sort of what their position in the market demands. I don't see any way to put those requirements together in a vehicle, especially considering how we can't import cars from China.
> especially considering how we can't import cars from China.
Are you referring to the US tax credit rules around battery origins or vehicle import tariffs? Because there certainly isn’t an actual ban on Chinese-made cars in the US. You can go down to your local Buick or Volvo dealer and buy a Chinese-made car today.
Apple will come up with a car to signal wealth. Like a $20K camry disguised in $200K white colored unrepairable car which will demand money if you want to drive it outside your city.
I thought and wondered this before I drove a Tesla, and then it all made sense. Teslas feel like what we would would have gotten with an "Apple car" had Tesla never launched -- next-gen hardware, software at its core, great UX, etc.
What apple brings is, I think, the same thing they brought to cell phones when we all thought a Palm Treo was the pinnacle of mobile tech. The same basic ideas as Tesla, but better design, better hardware, better software, etc.
I have no idea if they can actually pull it off, but if they can, they have a good shot at relegating Teslas to Palm Treo status.
My primary purchasing criteria for my next car is how easy it is to recover my iPhone when I drop it between the seat and the center console. Surely Apple will solve this problem in an elegant way.
Having taken 2 dozen Waymo rides, it’s all it’s cracked up to be. Confident driving, feels safe, clean. I just hope Google doesn’t decide to just turn around and kill it one day.
Of course they will. It's been billions spent on development to just offer you a slightly cheaper taxi ride, with no clear path to any kind of viable commercial service beyond "ok-ish" taxi provider in few American cities. Someone will get bored of it eventually and it will get shut down.
The path is building an entire centrally-directed transit network out of custom vehicles. Waymo currently doesn't look anything like that because they're still doing R&D on the critical technology, but if we have good self-driving even in just nice weather, it's very easy to imagine a radical transformation of transit. Of course you can make money on that.
>> it's very easy to imagine a radical transformation of transit
Really? How? Because I don't see it at all, and I don't think it's "very easy" either.
All they have created is a very slightly cheaper taxi service. How does that transform anything? You could be taking a taxi instead of driving everywhere right now - why aren't you?(not literally you I mean people in general)
Is that going to change if the ride is couple dollars cheaper? Of course not.
No Way[mo] that it gets shut down. Possibly split off and IPO'ed, but no one is going to throw away technology that is very close to cracking a multi-hundred billion dollar market.
100% this. I don't think Americans in general are aware of what the current state of Chinese cars (EV and gas) is like right now since they're not in our market. It's worth checking out some YouTube videos, this guys channel is pretty good for Chinese EVs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmQPwlHixWo
Yea I do want to know what the costing on this is. It's a bit hard to figure for BYD because:
(a) there's unknown government subsidies going on, and
(b) they mine and refine their own lithium and make their own batteries (also make Tesla's batteries too, I think). So their battery cost is... unusually low
