Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of TF Securities has made some predictions about the Apple Car that go beyond the speculation about Apple working with Korean carmaker Hyundai. According to Kuo Apple’s going to be working with other car makers too.
Kuo confirms the speculation about Apple’s involvement with Hyundai, indicating that Apple will be using Hyundai’s E-GMP electric vehicle platform as the basis on which Apple’s vehicles will be manufactured. Kuo believes that Hyundai will be involved in component design and production while Hyundai subsidiary Kia will take care of production of the car in the US. Hyundai sources recently told Reuters that Hyundai didn’t want to work with Apple after all.
Kuo also mentions General Motors (GM) and PSA (the brands Peugeot, Citroën, DES Opel and Vauxhall) will also be working with Apple to actually create the cars.
Since electric vehicles contain around 40 to 50 times as many components as smartphones, Apple will depend on the experience and resources of these established vehicle manufacturers in order to be able to realise its plans, claims Kuo.
“Apple’s deep collaboration with current automakers (Hyundai Group, GM, and PSA) who have extensive development, production, and qualification experience will significantly shorten the Apple Car development time and create a time-to-market advantage,” writes Kuo in a note to investors ( via Apple Insider).
“We believe that Apple will leverage current automakers’ resources and focus on self-driving hardware and software, semiconductors, battery-related technologies, form factor and internal space designs, innovative user experience, and the integration with Apple’s existing ecosystem.”
Meanwhile, more and more Apple patents relating to vehicle technology and autonomous driving are emerging. For example, a recently granted patent describes how the sensors can recognise and process the hand gestures of a person regulating traffic.
The patent for ‘Traffic direction gesture recognition’ describes the problems of existing systems that would recognise when a person is regulating traffic, but would then simply return control to the human driver and otherwise stay out of the situation. In Apple’s technology, the sensors and those behind them react directly to the gestures and stop the vehicle, start moving again or swerve. The system could also pass these reactions on to other devices or vehicles.
Read more about Apple’s Car plans.
This article originally appeared on Macwelt. Translation by Karen Haslam.