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Apple worked with China’s BYD on ill-fated ‘Apple Car’

MacDailyNews

Oct 17

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Apple and BYD collaborated on a long-range electric vehicle battery project from 2017 to develop a lithium iron phosphate battery system that was intended to be more advanced than existing EV batteries, Bloomberg News reports citing “people familiar with the situation.”

Gabrielle Coppola and Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
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Though Apple doesn’t own any of the technology used in BYD’s current Blade batteries, the partnership shows just how far the iPhone maker went in its efforts to produce a car. The tech titan spent roughly $1 billion a year over the past decade on the vehicle project — often seen as one of the company’s “next big things” — before scrapping it in February.
The technology that Apple developed with BYD would have been highly customized for the once-planned vehicle, according to the people. As part of the secret partnership, Apple engineers brought expertise in advanced battery packs and heat management, they said. BYD contributed manufacturing know-how and advancements using lithium iron phosphate cells — better known as LFP.
BYD said in an emailed statement that “the concept for the Blade battery originated with BYD engineers, who independently developed this LFP Blade battery. BYD holds complete property rights and patent rights for the Blade battery.”
Today, BYD’s entire car lineup is powered by the Blade system, which uses a battery pack design that people involved in its development say was informed by lessons from the Apple work.

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MacDailyNews Take: In March, Gurman described the Apple Car cancelation as “a massive disappointment that will alter the course of the company’s history, perhaps for decades to come.”

As we wrote at the time, in a Take that ages like fine wine:

This is not the only project inside Apple that’s wracked with indecision, disagreement, and waste. This is not an anomaly, it’s closer to the norm.

What if a major company had a CEO who was out of his depth, but who could look wildly successful for a decade simply by building out the company’s retail chain that his predecessor devised and iterating/not screwing up products that, again, his predecessor devised?

What would happen when real vision was finally required, but the company was hamstrung with an indecisive, myopic CEO with a seemingly unending list of misplaced priorities? – MacDailyNews, March 11, 2024

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