- [Male Narrator] An unparalleled design,
long-lasting battery performance,
and an innovative autonomous system.
Introducing the Apple Car.
- [Female Narrator] Well, our version of the Apple Car
if a car could be made out of iPhone parts.
Apple's auto ambitions have been rumored for years,
and we still don't know if they'll come to fruition.
But what we do know is
that from self-driving capabilities
to running completely on battery power,
cars are becoming more and more like giant gadgets.
Even if you're not driving a Tesla or new electric vehicle,
there's a good chance your car is still powered
at least in part by a computer.
So what's next in the digital car revolution?
- Today, traditional auto companies
need to radically change how they do business.
It's very different when you look at
how an electric and autonomous car is built.
It is more like a computer on wheels.
- [Female Narrator] But what would it take
to make a car that's just as convenient
and well-integrated as an iPhone?
And what parts does Apple already
have experience engineering and producing?
To answer that, we had an idea:
crack open an iPhone and build a car
with the key automotive parts.
Tom Forsyth, a 3D artists from London,
was up to the challenge.
We shipped him a bunch of recycled iPhones and components,
he mocked up some ideas,
and we were cruising right along.
- I would thoroughly not recommend taking apart iPhones
unless you're a trained professional for it
because you may get cut,
you may set things on fire in a very dramatic way.
- [Female Narrator] Okay, so not everything
in here is made of iPhone parts.
The wheels, container for the seats,
and some other parts are 3D printed.
But most of it is iPhone.
And yes, this was made in London,
so the steering wheel is on the right side of the car.
- [Tom] We tried to use as many
of the iPhone parts as possible.
We used the entire back shell and all of the main components
of the iPhone 11 to be the kind of main undercarriage
and engine of the car, as it were.
- [Female Narrator] While Tom was building,
we spoke to experts about the technology that's going to be
core to the future of the car.
Here's what we put together.
One of the most important parts of this computer on wheels:
the battery and the infrastructure to charge it.
Apple knows a thing about batteries and chargers.
Okay, fine. The Apple Car won't be charged
via lightning port,
and hopefully Apple doesn't change the connector
every few years.
But Apple has spent decades improving
its battery performance in everything
from phones to laptops to watches.
But does that mean Apple could just scale up its batteries
and put them in a car?
We asked Jennifer Colgrove, an automotive analyst
who spends a lot of time talking
with battery and car companies.
- And each battery cell still the fundamentally
same chemistry as the cell you are using on your phone
or your laptop computer.
They are the fundamentally the same chemistry.
But however when you pack a lot of the batteries,
thousands of them, sometimes even like tens of thousands
of cells together into a EV battery.
So that is dramatic.
- [Female Narrator] Most EV batteries
are made of some combination of lithium ion and cobalt,
both high-demand materials Apple's familiar working with.
But to make car batteries
you'd need more land to build a factory,
more raw materials and a labor force that knows
how to build EV batteries.
Of course, Apple could outsource its battery production
much like it does now with its iPhone batteries.
But Apple is known for vertical integration,
controlling as much of the supply chain as possible
like with its chips and processors,
another core, pun intended,
element to the computerization of the car.
Apple has been making its own A series chips
for the iPhone, iPad and Apple watch for at least a decade.
And in 2020, Apple announced plans
to end its 15 year partnership with Intel
to start making its own very powerful chips
for its Mac computers.
- [Male Narrator] And we call it M1.
- [Female Narrator] These sorts of chips can be used in cars
in a number of different ways,
but they're specifically very important
to autonomous driving, explained Armando Periera.
He brings together tech and auto companies working
on self-driving cars.
- When we talk about computing, we're talking about
how can we squeeze all of these down
to a chip that is powerful enough
to run everything in parallel.
So you can not steer now and forget about the brakes
or engine control.
You have to do all of these things simultaneously.
- [Female Narrator] Chips that power everything
from collision warnings to touchscreens
and self-driving features are in such high demand
that car makers have had to suspend production
and furlough tens of thousands of workers
over recent shortages.
Apple's new chip production sets itself up
as a major player amongst industry giants
like Intel, Qualcomm and Nvidia.
- Of course, there's the chips that do the data processing,
but just having a chip in the car isn't enough.
There's actually a mass amount
of software that needs to be in place.
- [Female Narrator] Danny Shapiro leads marketing
for Nvidia's automotive business,
which makes chips and software to process data
for hundreds of car makers today,
including Mercedes-Benz, Toyota,
and Chinese EV makers Nio, XPeng and Li Auto.
- And so we've created a whole platform.
It's called Drive.
And that is the heart of the cars,
really the brain of the cars as well.
So everything plugs into this brain.
So you have cameras that are looking forward
or on the sides or in the back,
there's RADAR, there's LiDAR,
which is laser scanning.
So all different senses.
- [Female Narrator] Nvidia's autonomous drive platform
is a decade in the making.
And we don't know much about Apple's autonomous ambitions,
but CEO, Tim Cook, said they were working
on autonomous systems a few years ago.
- We're focusing on autonomous systems.
And clearly one purpose of autonomous systems
is self-driving cars.
There are others.
- [Female Narrator] A big part of autonomous
or self-driving technology relies on cameras,
RADAR and other sensors to analyze
what's going on around the car.
A lot of the self-driving cars in development
today use LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging technology.
It's like RADAR, but instead of using radio waves,
it measures distances using lasers.
Apple has LiDAR scanners or cameras built
into its iPad Pro and iPhone 12 Pro,
enabling augmented reality features
like seeing how furniture would look
in your room before buying it.
Put that technology on a car,
and you get a comprehensive look at the roads around you.
Building a car is in many ways more complicated
than building an iPhone.
So even if Apple has the component knowledge,
why would it even want to enter the auto industry?
We asked Gene Munster,
an analyst that's been covering Apple for years.
- We spend a lot of time in cars,
and Apple wants to create products
that their mission is products that enrich our lives,
and a big part of our time is spent moving around.
- [Female Narrator] Plus Apple has a history
of revolutionizing products.
Remember Nokia phones or BlackBerrys and iPods.
- These are not three separate devices.
(audience cheers and applauds)
This is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.
- [Female Narrator] And the Apple brand
is already part of the driving experience.
CarPlay, which brings key Apple features
like maps, music and messages to your dashboard,
has become a major selling point for cars.
One survey found that 84% of people aware of CarPlay
wanted to have the system in their next vehicle.
It wouldn't be too hard to imagine Apple
using a large iPad size screen
for the dash of a car that's running its own software.
And like the iPad and iPhone,
cars are now increasingly dependent on software updates.
If our experiment of turning an iPhone
into a car taught us anything,
it was that it certainly be a massive undertaking
for the company.
And despite having the cash in DNA for it,
that doesn't mean Apple will speed in
by building the whole car
or even releasing an Apple branded car.
- A lesson I learned a long time ago,
which because Apple is working on something,
doesn't mean it's gonna see the light of day.
I long prophesied that Apple
would come out with a TV and was wrong.
- [Female Narrator] Apple doesn't comment on rumors,
but we can say with 100% certainty,
if there's an Apple car it will not look like this.
And for now, this might be the closest
we get to an Apple Car.
(gentle music)