AutoElectric VehiclesAn Apple McLaren supercar wasn’t as far fetched as you thinkApple reportedly burned through billions of dollars as it considered making everything from mini-vans to McLaren rivalsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
AutoElectric VehiclesAn Apple McLaren supercar wasn’t as far fetched as you thinkApple reportedly burned through billions of dollars as it considered making everything from mini-vans to McLaren rivalsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Apple reportedly burned through billions of dollars as it considered making everything from mini-vans to McLaren rivals
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: McLaren)
(Image credit: McLaren)
CouldApplehave made a car as amazing as theMcLaren GTS? It apparently thought about it – and now we’ll never see it, because Apple’s many car ideas have all been binned after the firm reportedly spent over a billion dollars a year on its ill-fated Apple Car.
A McLaren rival wasn’t the only kind of car Apple considered. According to Bloomberg it also prototyped aVW-style camper vanand a modular vehicle like theCanoodubbed the Bread Loaf.
Bloomberg’swell-sourced storysuggests that Apple had an awful lot of money but not much in the way of direction: in addition to designing its own cars it “weighed partnerships or acquisitions” with Tesla,Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen and McLaren, “among others”. But Apple never even came close to testing full-scale self-driving prototypes in public.
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That’s believed to be in part because the margins in the car business are very different to those of theiPhoneandiPad: Apple’s gross profit margins are more than double that of even the most successful EV manufacturers.
Some Apple insiders felt that driver assistance would be the best bet; others wanted full self-driving capabilities, aka Level 5, where cars don’t have steering wheels or pedals. Level 5 cars remain the flying cars of the industry, long promised – Elon Musk has been promising full self-driving was a year away since 2016 – but never delivered. The most recent Apple target was downgraded to Level 2, which is much like the driver assistance in current Teslas.
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If Apple had managed to deliver it, you’d be paying a big price for it – and you’d keep on paying. Full self-driving was always intended to be a subscription service; after shelling out an anticipated $85,000 for your Apple Car, Apple would then bill you for self-driving features as well as for Apple Music andApple TV+. And even then Apple would have been losing money: the estimated cost of making its $85K car was $110,000.
Apple can afford to play the long game with new products, of course, as the Vision Pro currently demonstrates. But the Apple Car appears to have been more of a Very Hungry Caterpillar than a car. If you want to drive an Apple-flavoured McLaren, it looks like the GTS with its CarPlay compatibility is as close as you’re going to get.
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