The initiative of Tim Cook’s company in the automotive area, known as Project Titan and which has been changing its strategy in recent years, would be preparing a revolutionary battery design that would give greater autonomy.
The challenge is immense even for a company with Apple’s resources since it takes a significant volume of manufacturing to be profitable, something that Tesla took more than 15 years to achieve.
Apple sets deadlines for its autonomous car project, with 2024 as the key year. The Titan Project, as the line of research on autonomous cars of the apple company has been known in recent years, started in 2014 and which has undergone several changes, could already have specific objectives, according to Reuters.
Apple’s goal with this project is to offer a vehicle for consumers – unlike Waymo, the Google company (Alphabet), which focuses on autonomous cars for the transport of passengers with robotaxis and on the delivery of goods in the last mile – for which it is designing a battery that could “radically” reduce the cost and extend the range of the vehicle, according to sources close to the project, although Apple has declined to comment.
To do this, Tim Cook’s company is beginning to reach agreements with other companies, such as a LIDAR sensor company, fundamental in an autonomous car, since what they do is emit pulses of light and measure how long it takes to return to perform a three-dimensional map of the environment and predict where the obstacles are. They could also use some of these internally developed sensors, as both the iPhone 12 and iPad Pro use this technology.
Apple’s battery design would be “monocell”, which according to experts consulted by Reuters could free up more space and add more material to improve autonomy, as well as consider that its composition is lithium-ferrophosphate, which could offer less overheating and be safer than current lithium-ion.
“It’s the next level. Like the first time we saw the iPhone,” a person linked to Apple’s battery project told Reuters.
An immense challenge, even for Apple
Apple already had an agreement with the Canadian company of automotive components Magna International to collaborate in this project of its own car, although it is not ruled out that it reaches an agreement with a manufacturer in the automotive sector, or that it finally decides to reduce its ambition to design an autonomous driving system that is integrated into another company’s vehicles.
In any case, entering the automotive sector is a risky bet that requires two elements: investment and time. “If there is a company on the planet with the resources to do that, it is probably Apple. But this is not a mobile phone,” a Project Titan worker told Reuters.
In terms of time, making car manufacturing profitable is a very long road. In fact, Tesla did not become profitable until the third quarter of 2018, that is, 15 years after being founded, and it has only chained four profitable quarters in this same year.
However, experts warn that for this adventure to be profitable, Apple would have to reach a significant manufacturing volume. “To have a viable factory, you need to produce 100,000 vehicles each year and keep increasing the volume,” a source familiar with the sector tells Reuters