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Comment by salimmadjd | Hacker News Reader

Of all the SV tech giants (obviously Tesla excluded), Apple has the best DNA to build cars.

They know how manufacture in scale. They know how build a vertical product. They have the cash to do it and they have a strong brand.

But most importantly, if the world moves to a car-sharing car-hailing model of autonomous cars. Ultimately, it becomes a consumer mobile play. This is where both Google and Apple own that experience. Siri will know where you are and when you need a car. This is something both Lyft and Uber wont be able to compete with.

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> Apple has the best DNA to build cars. They know how to manufacture in scale.

Something tells me shipping your phones off to be built by other people in China and building your own auto assembly factories from scratch are two completely separate things.

The image of "shipping phones off to be built by other people in China" could not be farther from the truth.

Not only does Apple plan every build in extreme detail (stations, tests, flow, etc), they send an army of PMs, EPMs, engineers, etc. to oversee each build in person. They have to.

Apple's manufacturing and operations expertise is enormous. It's a competitive advantage on the same scale as, say, Google's data center expertise.

this. literally every United SFO<=>HKG upper-deck is loaded with Apple engineers.

Scaling that model from single-PCB consumer electronics to cars might be difficult then.

Until they throw them out. SCNR.

> Something tells me shipping your phones off to be built by other people in China and building your own auto assembly factories from scratch are two completely separate things.

This is the question. Indeed, an electric auto is far simpler to manufacture than a legacy auto. Drastically less parts. Similarly, Tesla has demonstrated huge value in software component of the car, from the app, dashboard, OTA updates, not to mention fleet-wide machine learning.

Don't also forget Apple is extremely good at creating electronic devices. Apple has less than 20% of the phone device market but makes well over 90% of the profit. They hardly ever have supply issues (such as Google's Pixel) or quality issues (such as Note 7). Apple is known for their cachet and design but the reason Tim Cook is now the CEO of the largest company in the world is because their supply chain is, by far, the best in the world.

If a company is well placed to make an amazing electric car, it's Apple.

If there is any company well placed to make an amazing phone, It's BMW.

Well Denso did make a phone in the 90's...

an electric auto is far simpler to manufacture than a legacy auto

That may be the case but it's a solved problem. Legacy makers can churn out engines and transmissions on automated lines with no difficulty. Other than the engine and transmission, the rest of the car is about the same.

Maybe Foxconn has automotive ambitions.

That was pretty much the reaction the cell phone guys had when Apple entered their market.

I was an intern at RIM around the launch of the iPhone. I don't think what you said was quite accurate.

That was what people were saying publicly. Would love to hear the inside story.

They are completely separate. And you point is what?

Apple would likely do cars the way they do phones. So one of the barriers they will crack is Chinese-made cars being sold in the USA. And as a result, I expect that Apple's margins on cars will be triple those of North American manufacturers.

Take the precision by which apple makes watches, laptops or iPhones. They can scale the size up and with the same precision margins you'll get the car parts. You get BMW or someone else to source you the electric motor. And you just need to manufacture the body the interior part and put in your software. Obviously it's a lot more complex than this. But Apple could easily hire 10-20 people from car industry to fill the missing gap and get there in 5-6 years.

Uh.

My hobby is metal machining. Precision is a matter of understanding the physics of what you're doing, knowing your machines, and, well, the machines.

I can give you close to 0.0001 tolerances with the machine in my apartment (about 6-7 times better than stock cheap mills that haven't been properly tuned, depending on the material). Use a big, rigid, production-oriented machining center built for it, and you can do better.

I can't build you a car, though. Precision has nothing to do with this.

> But Apple could easily hire 10-20 people from car industry to fill the missing gap and get there in 5-6 years.

Something tells me you haven't been part of a project that involved mass production, complex engineering (not software-engineering; engineering), or regulatory compliance.

If I were to guess, I'd say Apple has already hired at least 10-20 automotive industry lawyers, just to get moving on just the regulatory side of it.

I think this is a troll comment, but if not I ask you to simply look underneath your car.

Any auto made in the last 20 years is incredibly complex. The biggest advancement has been hiding all that complexity.

I have swapped engines and welded cars together, so this is coming from experience. Every car has many sensors, sometimes more than 100. All these sensors feed into enormously complex software state machines written to do all calculations on a RTOS in bounded time and in a verifiably correct manner. This complexity started in, but doesn't stop at, the engine.

You are vastly underestimating the effort needed to duplicate a modern car. There have been times where I've sat for several minutes just marveling at the complexity and beauty of small parts I can hold in my hand. Some of them were surely a years work for an engineer. On any car there are thousands of these clever little parts. For roughly 20k you're buying a product of many thousands of years worth of work.

> in a verifiably correct manner.

What we've seen so far from the inside of various ECUs is that they are definitely not always operating in a 'verifiably correct manner', in fact, it's hard to say for sure if the mess of code has had any review or QA imposed on it at all. You'd think so but then it would have looked a bit better.

ECU's probably not honestly, but I was thinking about ABS/airbag controllers when I wrote that :).

Yea, but most of those sensors are needed to get that fossil fuel to burn efficiently, and meet emission mandates.

Electric cars would/could be vastly simpler. Simpler if they don't over engineer the vechicles. The current electric vechicles do nothing for me. I hate vechicles that I can't work on.

My hope is Apple builds a simple, open source, except the assisted driving, vechicle. A vechicle that a weekend mechanic could work on? Something like a 80's Toyota. Just a people mover, that lasts.

My fear is they will build a mac book pro on wheels. I've been told the last thing a buyer cares about is the ability/ease of repair. I just don't get it. I don't like things I can't easily repair.

There will be the day when the good job goes bye bye. Plus, there's a freedom knowing you have a chance at repairing something youself when that warranty goes bye bye?

I would love Apple again if they built a practical electric car. Put a few bells, and whistles in it, but don't it impossible to repair.

Manufacturing experience gives them maybe a small edge.

The real question is why would it be a wise move for any SV tech giant to move into the very competitive car industry. Is it a more profitable investment than healthcare, food or shipbuilding?

The fact that they have mobile platforms is irrelevant, unless they plan to ban Uber from their app stores.

> The real question is why would it be a wise move for any SV tech giant to move into the very competitive car industry.

Couple of reasons.

- Self driving car is an interplay of Software and Hardware.

- Apple needs a new market to make some noise.

- Tim Cook needs something big to carve out his own legacy, maybe he thinks self driving tech is ticket to come out of Job's shadow.

If I was Apple I would just buy Tesla. Problem solved.

That's a ridiculous statement when you don't qualify it with the price at which you would(n't) buy. I am sure Apple would love to own Tesla too, but Tesla shares a very expensive compared to other car companies'. And if Apple were to attempt a hostile takeover, they would have to pay even more. And what exactly would Apple get? Tesla has a fantastic brand, but so does Apple themselves. Tesla has some ability to mass produce cars, but nothing compared to most other car companies. Apple could buy Ford and get much, much better value for its money. The only assets Tesla has that would be of unique value to Apple, are it's employees and maybe some of the tech related to self driving cars.

Buying Tesla would be insane for Apple but bying Ford wouldn't be much less insane. Ford has a huge existing product range that Apple cannot really shape but would still have to support.

If Apple needs auto manufacturing/design know-how they should look at a small company like Volvo or Jaguar.

I agree. I don't actually think it would make sense for Apple to buy Ford. I just used Ford as an example because its market cap is roughly the same as Tesla's.

Ford is tightly owned by the Ford family who control 40% of voting rights in the company. They are unlikely to want to sell or relinquish that control.

Theoretically it would be possible to buy the company without their support - but it would be extremely costly and unlikely.

Sure, but unlike the rest, they have nothing to do with cars.

Google has maps, Uber has cars, other are just cars.

OTOH Apple has terrible AI. Siri has actually been getting worse in absolute terms.

How do you measure, in absolute terms, the difference between Siri and Google Assistant or Bixby?

By the number of times they try to call someone on my contact list when I ask where the nearest restaurant is.

I agree with you. Apple does have the necessary skills to make a self-driving car. I did cringe at the 'build a vertical product' part because they have not been doing that lately.

I am looking forward to see what they come up with.

> Of all the SV tech giants (obviously Tesla excluded), Apple has the best DNA to build cars.

whoa...chill out on the kool-aid

Lotsa downvotes on that guy. So who's got better DNA and why? Genuinely curious.

The concept of a "company DNA" is mostly a buzzword with a fuzzy meaning and should be avoided when trying to analyze and reason about things.

Pretty sure the takeaway is that (as above, Tesla excluded) Silicon Valley firms don't have the DNA to do heavy industrial manufacturing.

I'm not sure they don't, but I'll grant you that it's open to debate. Nobody does supply chain better than Apple, though, and that's gotta be worth something.

If they wanted to Foxconn it, I would think a company like Kia or Hyundai would be a logical partner for them to get into the business. Apple designs it with the help of their manufacturing expertise and imposes their usual tyrannical quality requirements (maybe with the help of some employees they could score from Honda or Toyota to get the requisite quality levels), their Korean partner produces it and everybody's happy.

And what would the benefit be to Kia or Hyundai. These firms have already entered the market chasing Toyota and GM. They have their margin structure baked in already. Moving to low-margin/high-volume contract work would cost them a ton of money.

It's the same reason that, say, Intel doesn't (can't) do consumer logic fabrication to compete with TSMC or Samsung. They have the technical know-how, but their fab capacity is already filled with Xeons that fetch like 4x the margin.

Kia and Hyundai are already comparable to Honda and Toyota on quality measures.

Your main point is valid in the contemporary sense, but don't forget that the Silicon Valley is called Silicon because it used to be the global fab hotspot. While manufacturing chips, boards, accessories, computers, hard drives, card readers, and mainframe racks isn't quite the same as cars, there's plenty of manufacturing know-how in the Silicon Valley. Does Apple have that kind of know-how, and does it make sense for them to acquire it? Not so clear.

But almost all of that left SV decades ago.

And yet, the companies that still exist from that time still have major (typically non-manufacturing) presence in SV.

Yeah, in terms of the best Auto/Tech pairing I would say ford/Microsoft is the highest profile?

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