After ten years, investing millions of dollars and nearly 2000 people, the Apple car manufacturing project finally declared a failure. According to media reports, Apple has recently officially shelved and cancelled all development plans for autonomous electric vehicles.
Southern+reporters learned that as early as 2014, Apple launched a car making project codenamed "Titan". However, in recent years, the team leader has undergone several changes, and the priority of the project has been repeatedly lowered until it is ultimately abandoned.
Why did Apple give up?
In the view of Southern+reporters, the main reasons for the failure of Apple's car making project are as follows:
Firstly, Apple's new appearance in car manufacturing requires a significant amount of tutoring in terms of technology and experience. However, both "poaching" and investing in technology research and development require a significant amount of funding, which is a heavy burden for Apple;
Secondly, the new energy vehicle industry is currently facing severe internal competition, only in China. According to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, the sales of new energy vehicles in 2023 were 9.495 million units, accounting for 31.6% of the total sales of new vehicles, with a year-on-year sales growth of 37.9%.
In the global market, the new energy vehicle industry has shown a trend of "stronger and stronger" - in 2023, BYD's annual sales reached 3.0244 million vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 62.3%, and Tesla delivered about 1.81 million vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 38%. Apple has missed the best opportunity to expand its market in the early stages and does not have an advantage in competing for users;
Thirdly, Apple has just released a new Vision Pro product. Some argue that Apple hopes to make it a core medium for accessing the "metaverse" and comprehensively lead the VR and AR industries in the future. Compared to car manufacturing, in situations where both require high investment, the investment return cycle of VR and AR industries is shorter, and market competition is smaller, so project priority is higher.
In addition, AI is also one of the core tracks that Apple is currently focusing on. For Apple, crossing too many fields at the same time is not conducive to its own cash flow. Therefore, after weighing, the car manufacturing project became the "sacrificial victim".
Xiaomi, be careful of repeating the same mistakes
"I was shocked to see this news! We know the difficulty of car building. Three years ago, we still made an extremely firm strategic choice to build a good car for Rice noodles!" Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi, commented on Apple's decision to give up car building.
Many netizens also sweated for him and said, "Will Xiaomi become the next apple in the car manufacturing industry?"
The concerns of netizens are not unreasonable.
Recently, new energy brands such as BYD have successively lowered prices, which has put great pressure on the pricing of Xiaomi's first car, the SU7.
If Xiaomi still wants to maintain its previous high pricing - according to industry chain news, the SU7 is divided into two versions: low-end and high-end, with a minimum selling price of over 200000 yuan. So, the Xiaomi SU7 is likely to collide head-on with car companies such as BYD and Geely in the same gear, making it very difficult for Xiaomi to seize the market and establish user stickiness in a short period of time.
Furthermore, like Apple, Xiaomi is also a newcomer in the field of "car manufacturing" and faces the challenge of "tutoring", requiring a significant amount of capital and manpower investment. On this basis, Xiaomi also faces more pressure of "high-end" than Apple - in the early years, Xiaomi phones eliminated domestic counterfeit phones with a price of 1999 yuan, but it also left consumers with the impression of "cheap" and "not up to par" for the Xiaomi brand. In order to change this situation, Xiaomi has continuously invested in flagship technology and self-developed chips in recent years. After multiple generations of products, it has accumulated over ten billion yuan in investment. However, the average price of mobile phones is still hovering around 1000 yuan, and the results are not significant.
The trend towards high-end mobile phones is not yet smooth, and there is also a rush to build cars. Can Xiaomi really persist in the future with huge capital expenditures, rapid saturation of the intelligent driving market, and the sniping of numerous new energy "peers"? We still need to wait and see.