Published on the 18/10/2016 | Written by Anthony Caruana

It seems that the car that never was will never be…

Apple’s Titan project, put together to build an Apple Car, has been pared back. Although, in typical Apple style, there was never any actual product announcement, it’s been widely speculated that the personal computing giant was looking to get into the car business.

So, what went wrong? After all, surely there’s little difference between taking over the automotive industry and going head to head with phone makers and telcos?

Apple hired some of the very best people who couldn’t get a job at Tesla. Elon Musk goes so far as to call Apple’s car project “the Tesla Graveyard”.

“They have hired people we’ve fired,” Musk recently said. “If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple”.

So, having hired the (second) best people available, Apple embarked on its project.

Anyone who was using a smartphone in 2006 will remember the awful user interfaces, the need to manually fiddle with settings when moving from a cellular network to WiFi and back again, and difficulty in getting contacts and other data to sync easily from phone to computer.

Apple fixed those problems.

Now jump into your car. Can you identify any massive usability issues? When it comes to today’s cars, there simply aren’t that many issues to fix in areas where Apple has excelled.

Of course, the big game in automotive engineering is with AI and autonomous vehicles. Who doesn’t want to get into a car, tell it where to go and nod off for a nap?

Some autonomous features are already available in mainstream vehicles. For example, the bane of all learner drivers on their license test, reverse parallel parking, can be performed automatically by many cars on the market. And there are braking systems that minimise the risk of rear-ending someone as well as many other safety features.

Musk’s Tesla, the darling of the smart car set, has many of these features and keeps adding to them through various software updates.

If Apple has abandoned its aspiration to build cars, it will need to start dealing with established car makers to integrate existing systems. That reduces Apple to being merely a parts supplier – and it has to be asked, is it in Apple’s DNA to be a line item on a parts manifest?

Look all over the world and identify the largest and most successful car makers in the world. What do they have in common? Government support.

Cars haven’t been manufactured or assembled in New Zealand for decades – once government financial support for the industry disappeared. And only this year, Ford, Holden and Toyota stopped making cars in Australia for the same reason.

Making cars and profit is really hard. Tesla is succeeding but, despite all the column inches they capture in the mainstream media, they are very much a niche player and profitability is still a struggle.

Will we see Apple in our cars soon? The answer is certainly yes but it will be in systems such as Car Play – high tech in-car entertainment systems that integrate with apps on smartphones. That could extend into sensors that give us intelligent insights into how our cars are operating with hooks into engine management systems.

Apple’s ‘secret sauce’ has never been its hardware. And it’s never been the software. It’s been the integration between the two and problem-solving. Their most recent successes have been the iPhone and iPad – where those two elements are so closely integrated as to be indistinguishable. And they solved the problem of portable, well designed computing.

The Apple Watch has great integration between hardware and software but it lacks a problem to solve. Similarly, the aborted Apple Car is a solution looking for a problem. That’s not to say automotive technology isn’t moving forward and can’t improve. But the kind of integration Apple has been good at is much harder to achieve in a car. And it’s questionable whether it will be valuable to the enough people to compel them to sell their current car for an Apple Car.

In this case, this is something, it seems, Apple has learned the hard way.