In the months after the Dyson car project wound down in 2019, Autocar was invited in for a full debrief and to see the prototype that had already cost £2.5 billion to develop.
Even though the car was ready to go, Dyson baulked at the further cost needed to take it into production and laid bare just how hard it is for a start-up, however well funded, to industrialise a new car and see money roll back in. No wonder Tesla gets so much credit.
Apple kept its own car programme – Project Titan – in development for five years after the Dyson car was axed, but it too was killed off as bosses failed to see how it could ever see a return on its investment. Low-margin, high-cost, hugely regulated cars are not phones or laptops.
Secrecy has always surrounded the Apple project and it was never spoken about publicly. News of automotive names involved in the project were typically limited to LinkedIn profile updates showing Apple as their employer.
Among them was Manfred Harrer, now head of vehicle development at the Hyundai Motor Group (HMG). His CV shows he was senior director of product design engineering while at Apple, but with the NDA still surely fresh in his mind, Harrer isn’t keen to break the wall of silence around it.
Still, here’s a senior exec sitting in front of me who has worked at Apple, a firm lauded for its ability to blend hardware and software. With the car project off the table (I tried!), I ask: more generally, what can the car industry learn from Apple?
“It’s customer first. It’s so customer-centric,” recalls Harrer. “And the attention to detail is extreme.” Such an approach “is kind of inspiring”, and while it’s one that HMG follows, Apple takes it further, which shows “you can do even more”.
That’s just what Harrer is doing. He says: “If there’s something you think is a given, challenge it. You can question it. You can think it through. It’s my personal learning that we can do more on this.”
He admits the amount of extra regulation for cars, compared with consumer electronics products, can make it harder for an automotive engineer to adopt such an approach but, even so, “how the customer looks, thinks and experiences the product” is where car makers really need to focus and can “squeeze out more”.
The ubiquity of smartphones in daily life is impossible for automotive engineers to ignore when developing cars, particularly interiors and usability. Harrer says “it’s not only the size of a screen any more but the responsiveness of the apps”, the data and services behind them, and the ability for updates and bugs to be fixed.
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