It was reported earlier this week that Apple’s long-rumored electric vehicle will launch in 2024, four years from now, but new reports suggest that we might need to wait for a bit more longer.
MacRumors reported that Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says that Apple’s electric car is still in its early stages and won’t launch for at least one more year. Kuo says that Apple could launch the vehicle by 2025-2028, this is due to the Apple Car specifications are yet to be finalized, making the development schedule ”not clear”. The sources say:
”We predicted in a previous report that Apple will launch Apple Car in 2023”“2025. However, our latest survey indicates that the current development schedule of Apple Car is not clear, and if development starts this year and everything goes well, it will be launched in 2025”“2027 at the earliest. Due to changes in the EV/self-driving market and Apple’s high-quality standards, we would not be surprised if Apple Car’s launch schedule is postponed to 2028 or later.”
The report also states that Kuo advised investors to not buy Apple Car-related stocks because the market is “overly bullish” towards Apple’s car project. Kuo also states that there is uncertainty about the success of Apple’s Car, saying that the company is lagging behind the EV/electric vehicle competition in artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies, stating:
“The market has high expectations for Apple Car. Still, we remind investors that although Apple has a variety of competitive advantages, it is not always successful in new
business. For example, Apple failed to enter the smart speaker market. The demand for HomePod and HomePod mini were lower than expected, and the development of new smart speaker models had been temporarily suspended. The competition in the EV/self-driving car market is fiercer than that for smart speakers, so we think it’s perilous to jump to the conclusion that Apple Car will succeed.
If Apple Car wants to succeed in the future, the key success factor is big data/AI, not hardware. One of our biggest concerns about Apple Car is that when Apple Car is launched, the current self-driving car brands will have accumulated at least five years of big data and be conducive to deep learning/AI. How does Apple, a latecomer, overcome this lagging gap?”
Apple has been developing and manufacturing its first electric vehicle since the first rumor came out in 2014, and the company has been hiring employees from companies like Tesla and collaborating with massive automotive manufacturers like Volkswagen. The project is still an open secret that Apple has been shushing about and won’t openly talk about it.
