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Comment by karpodiem | Hacker News Reader

Precisely. Manufacturing is hard/messy - the cavalier attitude that Apple/Google have with quality doesn't fly here.

I'll believe that Tesla is a real player if they're able to scale to 500K/units a year.

For a low-end luxury vehicle manufacturer, Tesla has a lot of quality problems.

Why not assume that Toyota will be the big player? They are obsessive about quality... And ship 10 million vehicles a year.

No one doubts that Toyota will be a big player. It's just that no one is really excited about hydrogen cars on the highway.

I'm excited about the idea, but the implementation so far is more than underwhelming. While power cells are much more advanced, but I don't write off any of those. I can see the appeal of electric cars though, as the infrastructure would be much cheaper than hydrogen.

To be fair, Apple has been doing hardware since, well, the Apple I in 1976.

Consumer electronics has slightly different engineering requirements, liabilities and scope than automobiles.

Sure, not to mention lifecycle.

I was just reacting to the "Manufacturing is hard/messy" - no doubt, but Apple has been orchestrating manufacturing at a huge scale to exacting tolerances for a while now.

Google does software (plus Glass, Nest, Chromebooks, ok, Nexus, etc., maybe, but mostly software...), while Apple has been been doing hardware and software all along.

Emphasis on slightly different. Apple easily has the experience and capability to handle automotive electronics.

The problem with Apple is that they sell high-end products with a luxury/status component. The problem with that is that fewer and fewer people actually want to own a car. Transportation is becoming a service, as opposed to a physical product.

Do you have any data to back that up? Because automobile sales in the US are at near all-time highs.

Not on a per-capita basis: https://petemurphy.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/per-capita-u-s-a...

(the population is also at an all-time high. ;)

https://www.fastcoexist.com/3027876/millennials-dont-care-ab...

"You're driving it wrong" will cut it even less well with cars than it did with phones.

Hopefully the sentence would be: "You're driving it, wrong."

And yet the iPhone 4 sold very well for 3+ years after that "controversy" subsided.

Hopefully no one will be driving by then.

The automotive world and software engineering are very far apart. There are very few people who are truly at home in both. What Apple does is consumer grade, not safety critical. Let's just take EMC. I'm sure Apple does think about that, but that is nothing compared what you have to do for a car.

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