> The dramatic shift to SUVs in the U.S. is driven by consumers caring less about traditional car value metrics such as performance.
The cause of this was exactly the opposite -- the CAFE rules classify SUVs as trucks and allow them to fall into a less stringent fuel economy standard. The result allows SUVs to be mass-market gasoline-powered large vehicles with powerful engines, which is no longer possible for things classified as cars. That factor is primarily what caused (big-engined) SUVs to replace station wagons and large performace sedans in the market, and the small car market is as strong as it ever was.
He also calls Ives a visionary more than once, but that was Jobs. Apple has done well under Ives because of his management ability, not his ability to develop new product markets as Jobs did.
Project Titan is a huge gamble. They're essentially trying to buy their way into a market where their competitors have a head start. Apple has the cash to potentially succeed doing that, but they could also spend billions and have it come to nothing, and it's not clear what they're adding that Waymo or Telsa or Uber doesn't already have. It seems to be some combination of "Google is doing it" and the fact that Steve Jobs saw that Telsa was onto something -- but there has been ten years of progress between then and now.
And the speculation that Apple will focus on personalization is odd. Their model is walled-garden, curation, single USB port on the MacBook, everything soldered and nothing modular, any color you want as long as it's black. If anything vehicle personalization is going to become less prevalant with autonomous vehicles as it makes it easier to share vehicles if they can show up at the location of whichever part-owner needs it at a given time, or be leased out for ride sharing when not in use.