Furthermore, Tesla's entire software ecosystem is already mature, so there'd be no gain from Apple on that front.
All that's left is cash, which they can get from Wall St. or any other investor on the planet right now.
And Apple is one of the most successful product companies of the last decade.
One big thing they would get from Apple is international experience/operations experience. From Apple's perspective I read today that Tesla is working on a facility to double the worlds lithium ion battery production - that would benefit Apple.
>> "Furthermore, Tesla's entire software ecosystem is already mature, so there'd be no gain from Apple on that front."
Integration. Integrating peoples smartphones, tablets, computers, cars, TV's. Tesla doesn't have the best designed software either - something critically important if you're accessing it while driving. I'm sure Apple's expertise would be useful there.
The software might help, but 1) isn't something Tesla need to differentiate themselves on further at lest yet and 2) excluding android may not be something Tesla is willing to do.
http://assets.yodawgpics.com/hashed_silo_content/silo_conten...
Apple isn't fit to make vehicles. They're a whole different league from consumer electronics. It isn't realistic to expect a very clearly function-follows-form company to design a viable, aerodynamic, fluid, and well-engineered car.
Apple also isn't in any position to design a vehicle either – they outsource parts and are more assemblers with some in-house design going on.
> a very clearly function-follows-form company
Your opinions about Apple are, to put it mildly, non-mainstream. I am a frigging software engineer, perfectly able to handle complexity, and I prefer Apple products precisely due to that "useless, stupid" ease of use. I also question that "function follows form" is their design ethos, but even if it is, the result is still better than anyone else's.
And that's the stupidest "yo dawg" I've ever seen. If there's anything that's too easy to use, it's online meme generator tools.
This "Yo Dawg" meme is a joke about those infuriating one-button mice that Apple released a few years ago.
Dealing with the additional organization overhead doesn't seem to offer much of a gain.
Apple can bring nothing to the table here, and importantly there is no "Apple Inside" branding which will affect whether someone buys a $60,000 vehicle. Apple is used to prodicts with a frequent model swap, not big capital outlays.
Forgot to say one thing at Tesla annual shareholders meeting: just as my money was the first in, it will be the last out.
As an aside, after hearing the Pando Daily interview, it never occurred to me that Elon would sell out his stake in Tesla. He feels more like the type to either sell the company entirely, or keep his stake but pass the reins off to someone else.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uegOUmgKB4E [2] http://www.treehugger.com/cars/elon-musk-how-long-hell-stay-...
Tesla provides turnkey low cost mobility. Google just needs to integrate the intelligence.
Furthermore, it would be super interesting if Google also took interest in Liquid Robotics as well if they see value in a global sensor network play.
Also, what if cars could be used as a last mile wireless play? None of this would be trivial, but they wouldn't have the cost of acquiring plots of land for antennas like telcos do. Pairing of a cellphone with a mobile car antenna could be done by comparing the directional vector of the vehicle with the the directional vector of people needing to connect to an antenna. i.e. if I'm driving along side a Google car, that's the natural choice of antenna to connect to.
You need to look at each car in the fleet as an asset with potential instead of purely as a capital expenditure limited to known revenue streams.
What you've described is already, in part, reality. Android phones already gather traffic data for Google Maps. http://www.theconnectivist.com/2013/07/how-google-tracks-tra...
Can you imagine the list of crippled, Naderized, and just plain missing key features that Apple would bring to your car's dashboard?