Source: Apple is gathering advice from carmakers and automotive suppliers about parts and production methods as it learns to build a self-driving electric car
Apple learning to make self-driving car: source — (Reuters) - Technology giant Apple (AAPL.O) is learning …
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands alongside two other February 2015 signals of the same program: Apple quietly opened a research lab staffed with automotive veterans after hiring the head of Mercedes-Benz R&D, and within days the identities of those hires confirmed the team was aimed squarely at an electric vehicle. Consulting carmakers on parts and production methods is the manufacturing half of that talent push — Apple already has the people, and is now buying process knowledge.
Read against what came later, the arc holds together: five years on, sources describe plans to manufacture a car by 2024 with internally developed lidar and battery technology, and by early 2021 Apple was reported close to a manufacturing deal with Hyundai-Kia for last-mile, driverless vehicles. The 2015 advice-gathering is the earliest documented step of Apple treating carmaking as a learnable discipline rather than a leap.
First-order effects
- Carmakers and suppliers approached for guidance face an immediate conflict: every production method they teach Apple equips a potential competitor for their own market.
- Apple's secret lab shifts from recruiting auto talent to absorbing supplier know-how, converting individual hires into institutional manufacturing capability.
Second-order effects
- Consulting relationships are a natural on-ramp to contract manufacturing — the later reported Hyundai-Kia talks show incumbents can end up as Apple's factory partners rather than its rivals, echoing how Asian assemblers built the iPhone without owning its design.
- Suppliers must choose between selling into an Apple program with uncertain volumes and protecting existing automaker customers who may retaliate against anyone feeding a future competitor.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, automaking splits along the consumer-electronics template: tech firms own design, software, and brand while legacy manufacturers compete for the lower-margin assembly role — or band together to keep it proprietary.
The trend: Consumer-technology companies are entering automotive by renting incumbent manufacturing expertise first, forcing carmakers to decide early whether they are Apple's teachers, suppliers, or competitors.