According to a report today of the Korea Times , Apple is apparently close to signing a deal with LG and Magna's automotive joint venture, currently called “LG Magna e-Powertrain.”
The contracts would presumably see LG and Magna International produce the first production batches of the Apple Car. The Cupertino company is expected to introduce its own electric vehicle (at the center of a hornet's nest of rumors in the last year) at the latest within the next 3 and a half years, in 2025.
The partnership between LG and Magna, however, is not yet completed: it will be completed by the end of 2021, and it could "debut" with Apple as the main customer.
Apple Car: Everyone aspires to produce it
Since the beginning of the year, I was saying, there has been a flurry of news online. Apple Lg, Kia Lg, practically the quadrigil. The popular belief was that Apple was at the center of an agreement with Kia and Hyundai, for a worth about 4 billion dollars. Something must have gone wrong, as the companies in question confirmed in February 2021 that they are no longer in legal negotiations for the Apple Car.
The bone of contention (again from the background spread) would have been the fact that the Apple car would have exclusively the Apple brand, and the partners would simply act as suppliers/assemblers, a bit like Foxconn with the iPhone. to Foxconn's relationship with Phone. Maybe Hyundai and Kia didn't want to be reduced to mere supply chain producers and sacrifice the brand.
LG and Magna do not have a significant (read: direct) relationship with the public in the auto industry, so they are likely more inclined to let Apple "put its signature" on the new car. There's more: LG and Magna already provide support, products and parts such as batteries, motors and more to all sorts of companies in the sector. We are talking about Tesla, General Motors, Ford and BMW. The Seoul-based company has its own line of development with its electronics sector, linked more than anything to its shop appliances. Magna's name, however, had already circulated last month on Bloomberg among the potential Apple Car company partners.
I promise sposi
Upon closer inspection, there was a sort of "competition" (I laugh) between Apple and LG, and it was in the telephone sector. In light of the latest behind the scenes on Apple Car, therefore, the "sudden" renunciation of the LG smartphone sector perhaps takes on a new meaning. A waiver confirmed just last week by the Korean company. The merger with Magna does the rest. Cell phones, no longer considered a central issue, abandoned by the leading electronics group in favor of a greater "good"?
The future will tell us. Apple has also been working on autonomous driving technology under the code name for 6 years now Project Titan. According to popular belief, Apple's design work on a real vehicle was interrupted in 2017. However, several signs (and several sites) say that already a year later Steve Jobs' creation has resumed work on a vehicle, including “human shopping” at other manufacturers, with hiring key executives by Tesla and Porsche (taken from the Fortune portal).
With the sale of a future Apple Car made by LG and Magna, Apple would move towards the unification of hardware, software and services in a single object. Who knows what a dealership version of the Apple Store would be like, between an iPad and a key ring.
