The Apple Car
Perhaps Apple’s biggest “moonshot” project is the Apple Car, which it’s been working on since at least 2014, and by most reports will likely take another four years before it sees the light of day.
That said, we did see some reports of some pretty significant progress last year, especially toward the end of 2020 that gives us some hope that maybe we could at least see Apple start talking about the project sooner rather than later.
For instance, Apple has now officially moved the Apple Car into its AI division, which suggests that it’s solved all the hardware engineering problems, and is putting all of its efforts into the autonomous self-driving side. Of course, that doesn’t mean that hardware is entirely ready, but the big technical design challenges have likely been addressed, and now it’s just a matter of refinements, tweaking, prototyping, and actual manufacturing.
A fairly sketchy supply chain rumour suggested that the Apple Car could be coming in late 2021, at least in preview form, but we think that’s probably the most unlikely of all Apple rumours we heard last year — second only to the ‘Steve Jobs Heritage Edition’ Apple Glass — as pretty much every other analyst on the planet agrees that Apple is far from ready. A subsequent report says the first consumer model won’t be available until 2024, while veteran Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who had originally predicted a 2023–2025 timeframe has since revised his own earlier estimate to 2025–2028.
So if there’s any truth at all to the rumours of a 2021 Apple Car announcement — and we really don’t think there is — it’s unlikely to be anything more than a very early concept preview. However, that really isn’t Apple’s usual style, and of course the company has been burned in the past by announcing things before they were ready. That said, an entire car is a considerably larger and more ambitious project, so it wouldn’t be entirely outside the realm of possibility for Apple to tease it in phases as things evolve, but we still think the odds are against it.