Catching Up With Apple Car: What Have We Learned?

World’s First Apple Car (2025) [Video]

Video uploaded by Supercar Blondie on September 24, 2022

Catching Up With (or Rather On) Apple Car: What Have We Learned By Now?

The time keeps ticking but the situation with the titular project doesn’t look to become any clearer.We are still not sure when it will materialize or even what it will finally turn out to be. (The public and even experts still allow for a chance that instead of an actual car, Apple will ultimately present us Apple Car with some sort of automobile enhancement). And yet, details and bits of info relating to this topic keep coming steadily, even though most of them amount to hearsay, gossip and secondhand reports.

So we decided it’s an apt time for summing up what we have learned on the matter by now – and what can we expect from this ambitious product (going by the name of Project Titan among the Apple staff).

And, since we already mentioned that the launch date looks unclear at best let us start there. According to the latest reports, after much to-and-fro and rumors about the release year spanning from 2028 to 2025, Apple seems to have finally made its mind and now plans to introduce their first car in 2026. Of course, it’s not over until it’s over, and we’ll see whether this schedule sticks next year, but so it looks at the moment.

Now, to the uncertain news number two – about who may Apple finally partner with on this vehicular enterprise of theirs. We have seen quite an assortment of names attached to it until now: there were negotiations with Volkswagen, followed by suspicions of possible cooperation with Hyundai and Kia, when those talks fell through. After that the Cupertino company apparently switched from car firms to component makers, such as CATL and LG. And then the word came about that a deal with another automaker – Lucid Motors – might be on the cards. Which, in fact, looked fitting enough: considering how advanced the Apple’s car is purported to be, an electric car company was a reasonable enough choice, especially since LM doesn’t carry as heavy a price tag as, say, Tesla.

But, ironically, it’s exactly this long spree of prospective partners’ names (plus the fact that there have been no fresh news regarding LM / Apple negotiations lately) which makes us seriously suspect that in the end Apple will have to break this ground on its own. There have been too many hoped-for deals that didn’t go through already, and coming to think of it, this only stands to reason. As we already noted, this project is ambitious – way too ambitious for any possible participant to agree for playing a second fiddle here: only one queen in the hive and all that. So we don’t hold our breath for the positive outcome of Apple’s current attempts to draw Porsche in, too. And neither does the tech giant itself, it appears, judging by all the reshuffling going on at the project management level: in addition to Kevin Lynch from Apple Watch being latterly put in charge of this team, AI department’s John Giannandrea just replaced Bob Mansfield.

So we don’t hold our breath for the positive outcome of Apple’s current attempts to draw Porsche in, too.

Thirdly, there is the question about how autonomously this presumed car will function. And this is quite a contradictory issue even for Apple itself, because it apparently retracted on its far-reaching idea of creating a completely all-inclusive vehicle model in which you won’t even have to lift a finger (or move a foot, if we were to trust recent promises of pedal-less, wheel-less car coming straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak). Just a month ago Mark Gurman, who is ought to know better than any of us, informed Bloomberg that nothing that dramatic is going to happen, and the drivers of those machines will still have to partly operate them – even though with much assistance – so no previously-planned entertainment / news center in the middle of the salon, either, we presume. Thus, the best and most different that we can expect from Apple car at this point are smart self-darkening windows that will be able to become more or less translucent depending on the outside road situation (which is still impressive, mind you) and a lot of inbuilt VR functionality, “enriching the driving experience”. Oh, yes, and a large role of iOS in running all that stuff is pretty much a given.

Finally, far be it from us to overlook such a notable aspect of any product (especially in the instance of those by Apple) as the price. And on this front, the company’s aspirations look to be the biggest: in the same article by Bloomberg it says that the firm intends to put all this fine package, including even the batteries of supposedly incomparably high capacity, in the price range under $100,000. Not an easy spend, of course, but not a “beyond the wildest dreams” sum either.

And all that, our friends, makes the venture of Tim Cook’s company into the (presently) Tesla-dominated field a most interesting one. We will certainly watch the Apple Car launch very intently… if we live to see it, that is.