After spending nearly a decade and billions of dollars on building an electric vehicle, Apple announced this week that it has scrapped its plans to complete it. Doing so, some analysts say, is a smart decision for the tech company.
“A successful and profitable company such as Apple has little to gain from building their own vehicle,” said Sam Fiorani of AutoForecast Solutions, a research firm specializing in the automotive manufacturing sector. “The minefields currently being traversed by the likes of Rivian and Lucid should have informed executives at Apple just how difficult an endeavor this would have been.”
The car was reportedly going to be expensive, and the high-end market is saturated, meaning Apple would be competing with Tesla, Lucid and Rivian while demand is going down. Additionally, because Apple already gets so much data through iPhones, the information coming through the cars wouldn’t be as valuable.
Analysts believe that it’s a better idea for Apple to focus on software, as well as improve the user experience for legacy automakers’ users through Apple CarPlay and other initiatives. “Today’s software-driven vehicles need engineers, like those at Apple, to create a system to gather, process, harness, and utilize data from drivers, passengers, and the vehicles themselves,” said Fiorani. “This is a bigger potential windfall than the actual development of a vehicle.”
