Apple Car By 2020? Senior Editor Of Edmunds John O’Dell Weighs In

Numerous media outlets have reported that Apple will build their own electric vehicle by 2020. However, John O’Dell, Senior Editor at Edmunds.com thinks that might be a stretch. O’Dell talked to DrivingSales News about what alternative projects Apple could be working on while everyone thinks that they are building a car. He mentioned its possible Apple is working on a creating a system they could sell to other companies.

Speaking about one theory of what Apple might be doing John O’Dell explained, “They are developing a car but they are developing a car to serve as a platform for a whole suite of … basically a user interface or even an entire Apple operating system that runs the whole vehicle including the power-train.”

O’Dell also mentioned Apple may be working on advanced car battery technology as a product to sell to others in the automotive space. “If they think that they’ve got the wherewithal in house, and they probably do, to develop a battery pack that could deliver that 200 plus mile and do it at a lower cost than anybody else is talking about … they’d make a lot more money selling batteries to all the carmakers than they would building a car and selling it and trying to compete against all the other automakers,” O’Dell said.

According to O’Dell it’s also possible that this is a project intended to prevent key employees from jumping ship. O’Dell said, “A very expensive exercise in keeping the talent happy. It gets a little boring. If you want to keep some of your top talent, you give them a project that reignites all of that and out of that project even if you go into it knowing that you’re never going to build a real car, you’re going to develop a lot of product that you can sell.”

O’Dell also addressed the Apple Electric car timeline. He doesn’t feel that five years is enough time for Apple to build a car from scratch. He explained, “2020, that’s five years from now and that would be a real good goal for a Ford or a General Motors developing something from the ground up. For a company that’s never built a car that doesn’t have any of the manufacturing systems to build the car, that still has to spec the thing from the ground up, that’s just an awfully tight timeline.”