“After teasing a possible insider’s look at an Apple Car, what Motor Trend actually produced was some very creative speculation. If Apple actually produced the car, the panel of ‘experts’ at Motor Trend envisages, it would be a disaster,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “Investors needn’t fear that Apple is so stupid.”
“The Motor Trend (MT) article betrays the usual misconceptions about Apple and its products. MT assumes, as do many, that Apple is all about style over substance. That Apple has succeeded on the basis of its product design. Fads change, market interest shifts, and poor Apple is getting left behind by the relentless commoditization of the smartphone. Therefore, MT focuses exclusively on design, coming up with what it thinks would be Apple’s approach. Something ‘groundbreaking’ in a superficial way, a sleek, futuristic sci-fi car, such as you might see in The Minority Report,” Hibben writes. “The interior is even worse… but I don’t really want to dwell further on design, because I think this was a completely misplaced priority on the part of MT. MT gives almost no thought to the critical elements that could be discriminators for the Apple car: its propulsion system and AI based self-driving capability.”
“AI is less likely. Apple isn’t actually that strong in AI, although it naturally has the resources to catch up. Autonomous vehicle systems such as Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) Drive PX provide a hardware platform, but there’s still much work to do in software development. Once again, it appears that autonomous capability is going to be a minimum requirement that just gets Apple into the game, rather than providing a discriminator,” Hibben writes. “That leaves propulsion systems, and this is where I think Apple may have something to offer. In fact, I consider it likely that Apple has some technology in electric energy storage that it assumes will be a discriminator. What that technology might be is open to question. It could be a breakthrough in battery technology, or something along the lines of a fuel cell…”
Much more in the full article here.
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