From fully autonomous driving to compromise, the path to Apple’s car in 2028

Under the latest changes, Apple hopes to launch an electric vehicle as early as 2028, about two years later than its most recent forecast, people familiar with the matter said. After Apple found that it could not complete a fully self-driving car in the foreseeable future, it turned to developing more basic driver assistance functions to match Tesla's current level.

The Apple Car, which has been arguing for nearly ten years, is finally facing a key decision point. They have decided to give up their unachievable fully autonomous driving ambitions and switch to a more practical design. The goal is to make this project launched in 2014 can be launched in 2028. Produce real results.

Although many media and analysts have claimed in the past two years that Apple will launch Apple Car in 2025, unfortunately things have backfired. Not only that, even if Apple gives up fully autonomous driving, their Apple Car launch time is still postponed. The latest timetable It has been postponed to 2028.

The Apple Car project launched in 2014, internally codenamed Project Titan, has faced multiple layoffs and several supervisor changes. Apple still has not given up on its dream of building a car. They don’t want to follow in the footsteps of Dyson, which spent $700 million but brought no results.

What’s interesting is that many companies don’t want Apple to give up building cars. To be more precise, many investors should be happy to see Apple continue to pursue its dream of building cars, because in the past two years, Hon Hai, Hyundai and many companies have lost money due to generation The topic of Apple Car has driven up the stock price. As long as this topic continues, there will be more opportunities.

But this turn of events actually brings the project closer to the finish line. Either they can make a less exaggerated Apple Car as planned, but at least have the same level of assisted driving capabilities as mainstream vehicles; if they still can't make it, it will be equivalent to announcing the end of Project Titan.

After all, it is already 2024. Not to mention Tesla, the assisted driving capabilities of traditional car manufacturers such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz have become more and more powerful. More radical Chinese car manufacturers are also constantly promoting new assisted driving capabilities. Apple wants to Waiting until four years later to launch a product with similar intelligence capabilities to existing car models, then you can really only rely on the logo to sell cars.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on this project. Apple has also developed self-driving computers based on cloud computing, closed test roads, vehicle engineers, and automotive chips. It’s hard to imagine that 10 years later, they haven’t even built a prototype car. come out. Returning to the practical side, it is not difficult for Apple to make an electric car with good hardware. Even Xiaomi has done it. If we put down too much persistence, we must launch a prototype car before 2026 and have it in the market. There is still a good chance that it will be officially released in 2028.

Here’s the problem. With so much investment and so many years of research and development, the price of Apple Car may be beyond imagination. But if it doesn’t have unique and innovative software, user experience or other unique features, I’m afraid most die-hard Apple fans will not buy it. There is no way to do it.