Posted on 02/21/2015 9:50:45 PM PST by Swordmaker
Apple fanboys and Samsung’s “Next Big Thing”ers would hoot with derisive laughter if The Wall Street Journal or Financial Times reported that GM or Ford planned to rewrite the rules of smartphone innovation. But when media coverage suggests Apple may redesign the automobile, even the most cynical car-lovers quiver with righteous curiosity. They should.
Could Sir Jonny Ive be the next Battista Pininfarina, Harley Earl, or Akihiro Nagaya? Don’t bet against him. Steve Jobs’ successors are at least an order of magnitude more credible as disruptive innovators than the heirs of Ford and Sloan. The computer, software, telecoms, music, broadcast, publishing, photography, retail, and consumer electronics industries certainly believe so. Apple demonstrably understands design, UX, and global supply chain alignment in ways few organizations ever have. According to data from Yahoo finance, company’s market cap exceeds that of Toyota, BMW, Volkswagen, Ford, GM, Honda, Fiat Chrysler, Tesla, and Daimler combined. Apple’s cash hoard currently tops $175 billion.
If Apple truly wants to fundamentally transform the driving experience and global automobile business, it surely has the ingenuity and resources to do so. Super-investor Warren Buffett’s admonition that “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact” doesn’t apply. Unlike commercial aviation, automobile economics brilliantly reward the brilliant. Apple is brilliant. Don’t bet against them.
Who knows what an iCar might look, feel, or drive like? I don’t. But the better and more challenging question is, how would the automotive industry’s incumbents respond to genuinely disruptive competition? How might the industry splinter, shatter, or consolidate when truly well-endowed innovators commit to upending expectations around the DX — the Driving Experience? The money, frankly, is secondary; the real issue is creativity and capability.
Consider what happened with the iPhone. Incumbents Nokia and RIM—the handset status quo—collapsed into irrelevance. They simply couldn’t compete. By contrast, entrepreneurial non-incumbents like Google counterattacked with Android. Samsung and Xiaomi—a company that didn’t even have a smartphone five years ago—quickly became dominant players.
No, an automobile is not just an iPhone with wheels. But is GM a Blackberry and Ford a Nokia when Apple competes with a DX, a business model, and an iCar “genius bar” support network that makes their offerings look last century?
The failure of Shai Agassi’s Better Place and the ongoing production challenges confronting Elon Musk’s Tesla underscore how hard being an entrepreneurial 21st Century automobile start-up can be. Musk, whose company is reluctant to hire people from the industry, has bitingly observed that his established automotive competitors are innovation laggards. “I had thought the big car companies would be coming out with electric cars sooner,” he observed in late 2014. Their failure to do so was “mind blowing.”
But Apple would deny any and every incumbent their “too small to matter” excuse for inertia. Indeed, precisely because Apple knows how to profitably scale its design, UX and supply chain expertise, automobile manufacturers would be compelled to react and respond. Traditional retailers smirked and cried “niche!” when Ron Johnson began rolling out Apple Stores in 2001. Yet those stores have successfully redefined retail norms and customer expectations well beyond Apple products and services. Apple dramatically influenced even its indirect competitors.
So put aside its brand equity. Apple’s command of UX and technical infrastructure create multiple opportunities to transform the economics and expectations of every value-added aspect of the automobile experience. Building a car is the least of it. Apple needn’t build a car any more than it must build an iPhone or an iPad (thanks, Foxconn). All Apple has to do to force fundamental industry restructuring is do what the incumbents have not—redesign the end-to-end purchase and DX, not just the cars themselves.
That’s a bold vision for an entrepreneur, but a revitalizing challenge for a post-Jobs Apple. A partnership with Uber, for example, could be as DX transformative as special arrangements with the traffic management authorities in Beijing, London, Los Angeles, and New Delhi. How might Apple leapfrog or reframe Google’s autonomous vehicle approach to DX? Even a modest Apple incursion into the automotive industry would likely prompt an entrepreneurial explosion of innovation—and innovative—partnerships. To what extent might an automotive counterpart of “apps” and the “app store” generate new automotive expectations and value?
Indeed, it’s easy to see how a Google has as much or more incentive than Apple to “own” tomorrow’s DX as the future of personal mobility and sustainability evolves. After all, Google’s Waze is already evolving into an indispensable global DX standard. More difficult to anticipate is how a Toyota or Ford or Volkswagen will respond. These companies haven’t had to respond to a truly disruptive innovator in over forty years.
Toyota, without question, is the real incumbent to watch. If Apple drives into the automobile marketplace, Toyota has the most to lose. Between the Lexus and the Prius, Toyota’s the one dominant market leader that consistently respects design and business fundamentals even as it innovates.
Even if it never built a single car, Apple would likely prove the most serious and worthy competitor Toyota ever confronted. Toyota knows that Apple could design, build and deliver a DX that Toyota’s best customers would like. Maybe it wouldn’t be a “car”….but it would be something that redefined how people thought and felt about what it means to buy, own, and drive a car.
I bet BMW, Volkswagen, and Ford know that, too. The question is, what are they going to do about it? Will the incumbents wait and see? Or will they take the wheel?
If Apple hits the accelerator on its DX option, the next ten years of automobile innovation will be more interesting than any ten years of the automotive past.
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They will be able to charge much more and still get fanboys to buy.
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Do you mean like Toyota can put fancy trim on a Corolla and call it a Lexus and get their fans to pay four times the price? Or do you mean get discriminating buyers to pay the price for quality, ecosystem, and service?
If cars crashed as often as computers...
Sorry, Apple. You just can’t reboot your car or download new drivers.
They would immediately get a hate group set up by who would fardels
bear. Cuz he’s so irritated about Apple.
so if Apple’s computer was a Macintosh, would their car be Lemon ?
Just jerking yer chain..........
Speak for your crash prone Windows computers, OrangeHoof.
My daughter shut down my iMac to move it today. . . first time it has been down other then updates for seven years. ZERO CRASHES and been on for all of that time. Let's see. . . 61,368 minimum of continuous operation without a crash. Can you say the same? At my office we have twelve iMacs, three MacBook Airs, one MacMini Server, and a MacPro also running 24/7 for the past seven years. . . so now we have (and although some of those have been upgraded with new machines in that time) SEVENTEEN times 61,368 hours or 1,043,256 hours of continuous operation, and during that time we have experienced exactly TWO crashes. Both of which were cleared by merely restarting the computer. That is an extraordinary record. Can you say the same about your Windows PCs????
Golden and Red Delicious Apples.
Actually pretty funny. . .
Then we’ll soon see a type of driver that makes the smug from Prius drivers seem reasonable...
may God have mercy on our souls.
If Apple made a car, and I had to bring it back to the dealership because it came with a faulty battery, they would not replace the faulty battery unless I paid them to replace the windshield as well.
This is ludicrous tomfoolery.
Here’s the old “if windows made a car” joke, just to even things out.
http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com/windowsxp/articles/624/1/If-Microsoft-Built-Cars
If they made a vacuum cleaner it would be called the iSuck.
And where has Apple given that bad of service?
Suicidal homosexual liberals make poor inventors but are good at hype. My old android had most of the “new” i6 features a year before people stood in lines to “upgrade.
If it was not for Linux, the Apple / Mac world would have crashed and burned years ago.
They’ll blame every wreck on the other car?
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