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Comment by FreedomToCreate | Hacker News Reader

Apple is a consumer electronics company. They build focused hardware with software that they patch over time. Cars don't work like that. Cars are like building 100 products into one thing. Fine tuning every aspect of there design is incredibly difficult and is reflected in cost. A software for cars is completely different. For Apple to completely commit to cars, the dynamic within its culture will have to radically change. Look at Tesla, their employee culture is nothing like the other SV companies.

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Reminds me of the classic quote by Palm CEO Ed Colligan from 2006.

    > PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.

Apple is by no means guaranteed success with a car, but I can't help but think they've thought through the company culture challenges. By hiring on so much new talent specific to building a car, they're hopefully changing the culture in the way they need to.

Didn't the president of Nokia make a similar argument about computer companies entering the smartphone market? I'm not saying a car and a phone are the same, but it's a parallel to keep in mind when framing these arguments in your head.

EDIT: Found what I was thinking of. It was Ed Colligan, Ex-Palm CEO on 16 Nov 2006.

>>We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.

How many companies has that been true for, though? Apple is the only PC company who made it big as a phone manufacturer. It's a single point on the graph.

Wifi, two cameras one with a flash, finger-print, GPS, gyro, accelerometer, display, force-sensitive touch displays, sensors for display, cell-reception, in/out microphone ports, co-motion processor, bluetooth, speakers, etc etc.

Not to mention a ton of software.

Those are several products in one. Wether or not they actually build and design everything themselves is irrelevant. Not all car companies makes everything themselves, most share engines and other parts.

Vehicle engineering is on an entirely different scale to a mobile device. Imagine having to engineer all of that for one phone — and then as many times over as it takes to equal the volume of an average car — there you have your engineering challenge.

It's a massive undertaking. Musk was able to pull off Tesla because he saw a frontier that needed to be saturated, and has a history of trailblazing through new industries. It's not that Apple can't do it. They'll just have a hard time doing so.

The complexity is still vastly different with cars than any electronic device Apple builds. All those individual items you list are likely in your future car if not already there buried among a hundred to thousand more such complex items.

While Apple may be supply chain wizards in electronics they would need to replicate it many times over to build cars and even then create a whole new distribution and support system.

I think their best bet is to be the smarts of all cars, why restrict themselves to just their own cars. Just launching one car would cost them a sizable chunk of their money trying to launch more than one would be many times more difficult, just ask Tesla. Tesla isn't out of the woods because unlike Apple they don't have the reserves to spend; assuming Apple stock holders would go along with the idea of spending tens of billions to start yet another car company.

No, I think Apple is better at being another supplier and getting everyone into their game. That gives them more flexibility and more penetration for a lot less. They are likely also the only company that could get their logos on the screens of all cars

The difference is the number of engineering disciplines involved. A smartphone, as complex as it is, still requires a relatively narrow set of disciplines compared to an automobile.

Systems engineering was basically created by the auto and aerospace industries for this reason. It coordinates all these disparate disciplines into a single, cohesive effort. What I have seen of systems engineering[1] in SV does not leave me with the confidence that most of those companies will actually succeed beyond some science experiments. At least, not the companies that haven't started out as fundamentally car companies like Tesla did.

[1] Real systems engineering, not glorified, overworked sysadmins

Electric vehicles are far simpler than internal combustion engines. I mean, you don't even need things like electronic fuel injection. Literally, the complexity of building a car goes from the complex systems developed over a century back to the simple vehicles of the late 1800's.

What about the complex battery management needed for an EV? Or the power and vehicle dynamics management needed if there are multiple motors? Or the additional complexity of the regenerative braking system? Or the fact that the car itself is a very small part of the entire product lifecycle (think design, testing, parts availability, service, etc.)?

No, they actually aren't. Most of the complexity in a consumer vehicle is not in the powertrain, though a significant portion is. As far as the powertrain is concerned, the main savings in complexity is dropping the transmission and differential (or transaxle, depending on the design). Energy storage and loading is far more complicated on an EV than an ICEV, and the motor control system that replaces the transmission/transaxle is far more complicated than the engine control software that runs an ICE. Also, electronic fuel injection is not really that complicated.

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