Apple Car project team may be reassembled by year's end in light of changing EV market conditions

Apple hasn't given up on its Project Titan dreams to build a premium electric car, reports credible analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of TF Securities. Earlier in the year, he sent a memo to clients informing them that the Apple Car team is being disassembled and its engineers spread across departments. The core of Project Titan, though, was still working on Apple's EV dreams, and now he claims that the Apple Car team will be reassembled again, reportedly by year's end.

This process, he added, may have simply been a restructuring of the Apple Car division, as its alleged ambitions now are to task various suppliers with developing the components and assembling the chassis, rather than partner with an established automaker as its initial efforts indicated.

This is much the same approach Apple applies to its bread-and-butter iPhone production, developing parts directly with suppliers and tasking the assembly to Foxconn. That has proven to bring the highest profit margins as Apple doesn't have to maintain cumbersome manufacturing capacity.

Moreover, Biden's new Inflation Reduction Act EV subsidy requirements show that the US government will increasingly push for strategic production to be moved out of China and Apple will now have to take that into account, too.

In fact, the iPhone 14 Pro Max is coincidentally both the most expensive iPhone to make so far for Apple, as well as the one with the highest ratio of US parts in it. This goes to show that Apple is increasingly willing to eat some profit margin in order to comply with the inevitable push for decreasing factory dependency on China.

Apple's Taiwan-based manufacturing partner Foxconn has an electric vehicle development platform that recently released its first vehicles made in a partnership with another automaker, so the newly reassembled Apple Car team may be gunning for the same approach. Nevertheless, Mr. Kuo does not envision the Apple Car project to be ready with a tangible vehicle before 2025 rolls in, so there is still plenty of time for its manufacturing plans to change.

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