Technology

This is referring to the team working on the self driving functionality.

Not sure if 100% a joke or just partly but Volkswagen was probably providing the mechanical engineers who were retrofitting Lexus vehicles of the project as they had for the already-deployed driverless vans. See NYT & MacReports

Except news always was that Apple was pushing pretty hard into self-driving vehicles, which would use much the same AI learning systems as you need for generative AI.

A problem with apple...Like if my friend has a Toyota, i can borrow that. If they have an icar, I probably couldn't drive it because I don't have an iPhone required to start it or apple shoes required to activate the pedals. You know they'd be dicks like that.

Competition usually isn't bad. Unfortunately, Apple has a tendency to not only be terribly anti-consumer, but also tends to be a trendsetter. They do shitty things, and other companies learn from their example. Thus, the competition becomes a race to the bottom.

Apple can't compete in that space. Their schtick is producing moderately inexpensive nice looking goods for exorbitant prices that are designed to be impossible to repair by anybody with them.

Tesla has already corned the market.

Trying to block people from repairing? check, trying to block sales of used items? check. Getting rid of all the buttons for all the interfaces and making you work with a tablet in the center of the car? Check.

Apple isn't competition, Apple is a closed market, more anticompetitive than Microsoft and only undone by the degree of their control.

The fear for me was that Apple would grow quickly in the EV space due to its mainstream popularity, and then start doing the ecosystem thing so driving anything but an Apple car makes you a second-class citizen. Obviously it would only support Carplay and not Android Auto, and probably lack any sort of non-Carplay connectivity so you just can't connect your Android phone to it at all. Presumably it would also have a proprietary charger that doesn't work with other cars or vice versa.

they probably would’ve had a slick UI

Apple hasn't had a slick UI since Apple II PC.

I was kind of hoping that Apple and Tesla would just feud with each other for control of the "economy-quality product marketed as a luxury-quality product" market share.

Or blaming customers for problems, "You're shifting it wrong."

They might have pulled the luxury brand "buy once, cry once" approach and made all those upgrades a single insanely high fee. "Base model is this, but if you want seat heaters that's another $8,000, if you want lane assist, that's another $5,000" etc etc

Also you can only use it on roads built by Apple!

You joke but it's not terribly far off.

Their real hope was to get Hyundai Kia to build EVs for them. While letting Apple act like they were the majority stakeholder of the deal.

We put the charging port underneath the car!

Wheels come separate each for $10k, unless you want to use VESA mount for the car

I guess we will never see an electric car with the charging port on the bottom

As an engineer who's spent a good chunk of his career working on stuff that got cancelled, it's really not that bad. You're generally paid well and looked after, learn a tonne on someone else's dime, have good job prospects, a strong network of talented colleagues, plus most engineers are there for the team problem solving and challenge anyway. The final product release is just the cherry on top.