, its initiative to build the future of transportation. If the reports are accurate, the project chewed through billions of dollars and several high-profile leaders as its mission shifted and shifted again. What may have started as a control-free autonomous vehicle was eventually. But, I’ll be honest, I never believed we’d see an Apple Car in the real world, because it seemed so impossibly far-fetched as to be fictional.
Even the most environmentally-friendly car still needs oil and grease to lubricate its workings, wheels that leave rubber on the road, brake pads that wear down. Seats that have to deal with spilled coffee and toddler vomit when you’re on a long road trip, the grime you only seem to find when you’re loading IKEA boxes into your trunk.
And that’s before you get to the idea that Apple, who is quite obsessive about its brand, would have its logo plastered on the internet every time one of its cars so much as kissed a lamppost. Car accidents are currently an unfortunate fact of life that we, as a society, are not prepared to tackle the way we should. But all it would take is one fatality in an Apple car and the company would be demonized — and opened up to a raft of lawsuits all looking to get a piece of Apple’s cash pile.
I’ve also struggled to fathom out how Apple would justify charging $100,000 for a limited-run EV when its real wins have come in the mass market. EVs take enormous amounts of capital and labor to assemble and it’s nowhere near as profitable as what Apple does today. In Q3 of 2023, WV — the world’s biggest car maker — made a net profit of about $4.7 billion, or about a quarter of what Apple made in the same period.