iCAR or Tesla? Your auto choices in 2020?

I just read a fascinating what if? article in the March 30th issue of AUTOWEEK. Wes Raynal is making a pretty convincing statement that Apple is considering building an iCAR for 2020. Or maybe just buying and redoing Tesla. I hope a lot of GRMERS read it. AS he pointed out, they have enough cash to buy GM & Ford both outright. I'd be very interested in hearing others' comments on this article.

But I will have to add. The pictured Ford, designed by Marc Newson who now works for Apple, is about the closest thing to a Vanilla Wafer of any automobile design I ever recall seeing!

Meh...harbingers of the self-driving car era, which I don't personally care for. I'm in the rapidly dwindling minority though.

Just screams "Let me relax in the arms of big brother and big corporations and not take any responsibility for my own actions."

That said, I'm sure the iCAR will be the IT thing to have. It will look stunning, but be so fragile that you have to buy an Otterbox to wrap around it. A new model will come out every 2 years, and they'll last about 80% of the service contract before the batteries are shot.

My lawn: get off it.

I'm not the new-car buying type but by 2020 I think about half of the cars for sale will be electric and autonomous highway driving (like what the Tesla S will soon get in an update) will be common on higher-end cars. Apple and Tesla won't take over the auto industry but they could be major manufacturers. The idea of an Apple car really doesn't appeal to me though.

Which way car styling will go is anyone's guess...IMO things are far better now than they were in the early/mid-2000s, the styling of today's boring appliances would have looked awesome back then.

Good for them, and I wish them luck.

But I predict that in 2020 99% of the cars sold in the US will have internal combustion engine power.

And when the self driving car finally arrives- most of those will be internal combustion engines, too.

BTW, if Apple puts overtones to buy enough stock in GM or Ford to "own them"- I bet that the value of each company will immediately jump. Apple has not much in terms of assets and plants, whereas both of those have more value in factories than they do in stock value. Not even sure if Apple makes thier own stuff, or contract that out, in China.

alfadriver wrote: Not even sure if Apple makes thier own stuff, or contract that out, in China.

Designed in Cupertino, Made In China.

I'll probably be driving something built in the 1930's at that point. For being on the older end of the Millennial generation, I tend to feel like I belong in a different time.

alfadriver wrote: But I predict that in 2020 99% of the cars sold in the US will have internal combustion engine power. And when the self driving car finally arrives- most of those will be internal combustion engines, too.

What!? I'd be shocked if that was the case...I'd put my money on 20% of new vehicles being electric at a bare minimum.

To have 99% ICEs in 2020, EV technology would have to park its ass right where it is today, gas would have to stay cheap, and the last slivers of diminishing returns would have to be quickly squeezed out of ICEs.

GameboyRMH wrote: I'm not the new-car buying type but by 2020 I think about half of the cars for sale will be electric and autonomous highway driving (like what the Tesla S will soon get in an update) will be common on higher-end cars. Apple and Tesla won't take over the auto industry but they could be major manufacturers. The idea of an Apple car really doesn't appeal to me though. Which way car styling will go is anyone's guess...IMO things are far better now than they were in the early/mid-2000s, the styling of today's boring appliances would have looked awesome back then.

Maybe in California...

Have they even started testing the self diving cars in inclement weather?

Snow, Ice, High Wind, and Rain are not as formulaic as dry pavement.

GameboyRMH wrote:

alfadriver wrote: But I predict that in 2020 99% of the cars sold in the US will have internal combustion engine power. And when the self driving car finally arrives- most of those will be internal combustion engines, too.

What!? I'd be shocked if that was the case...I'd put my money on 20% of new vehicles being electric at a bare minimum. To have 99% ICEs in 2020, EV technology would have to park its ass right where it is today, gas would have to stay cheap, and the last slivers of diminishing returns would have to be quickly squeezed out of ICEs.

I appreciate that, but I don't see the advancment in batteries to have 3.2M electric cars sold in 2020. That's a rather massive increase in just 5 years.

Maybe that many hybrids, but they will still have ICE's.

I just don't see the improvement in batteries. I do see ICE's making improvements, but I also see a lot of vehicle level improvements, too.

By the time I retire in 2023 (hopefully), I still expect 99% of new cars will have ICE's powering them. Even with all of the new rules.

I won't consider any sort of electric vehicle until they make one with a size in between tiny and humongous that actually has good driving dynamics. It's certainly possible, it just hasn't been a priority.

I think there's a tremendous amount of money to be made off of the intellectual property associated with successful self driving cars. I don't think Google or Apple or even Tesla wants to build self driving cars for all of us. They want the major manufacturers to continue to do that. They just want a piece of every sale and probably a subscription fee to keep your self driving up to date. They can get rich(er) without having to manufacture anything.

drdisque wrote: I won't consider any sort of electric vehicle until they make one with a size in between tiny and humongous that actually has good driving dynamics. It's certainly possible, it just hasn't been a priority.

The problem is that people don't buy the cars they NEED, they buy the cars they WANT. Cars always have and always will be status symbols.

People that want hybrid or electric cars seem to want to advertise that fact. I have to think that's why the Prius sells like hotcakes while the Accord, Camry, and Civic hybrids flopped. What good is a hybrid/electric vehicle without the smug emissions?

I'm waiting patiently for the next iteration of the flame-spewing Mazda rotary.

alfadriver wrote: I appreciate that, but I don't see the advancment in batteries to have 3.2M electric cars sold in 2020. That's a rather massive increase in just 5 years.

Well that's understandable, there hasn't been much advancement in EV batteries for a long time now. EV batteries get improvements in big jumps when new types of batteries become established enough to make it into cars - bleeding-edge battery types only get into the high-end RC world, if they make it out of a lab at all. The last big jump was from lead-acid (ni-cad was skipped over, and nimh couldn't be used thanks to Chevron) to li-ion which is what turned EVs from curiosities to practical daily drivers overnight. I figure the next big jump will be around 2018 and it will be a lot bigger - i think it will most likely be to dual-carbon or solid-state lithium batteries.

Keep in mind when a battery has 1/3 the energy density of gasoline, the energy density of the battery will be practically equivalent to a gas tank of the same size for use in a car.

GameboyRMH wrote: Keep in mind when a battery has 1/3 the energy density of gasoline, the energy density of the battery will be practically equivalent to a gas tank of the same size for use in a car.

That's true for today. But there is a lot of research into waste energy recovery systems. So that 1/3 number will have to go up.

IMHO, what will happen is full hybrids will slowly expand, but partial hybrids will take them over. Where you have an alterantor that can either absorb energy or put out energy (GM has one right now with thier cars that stop-start). With the tech to generate energy out of waste heat, that will go right into the crank. Maybe have a nominal KERS like system.

The rumor I'd seen was that Apple had about two hundred or so engineers on some sort of automotive related product. At the OEM level, that seems more suited to some sort of add-on system than developing a complete vehicle from scratch.

So Apple will just steal all Tesla's ideas put them in a white and silver rectangular box with round corners and fanboys will buy them the day they come out.

MadScientistMatt wrote: The rumor I'd seen was that Apple had about two hundred or so engineers on some sort of automotive related product. At the OEM level, that seems more suited to some sort of add-on system than developing a complete vehicle from scratch.

Apple does the OS for many of the infotainment systems out there.

(not ours, sadly....)

93EXCivic wrote: So Apple will just steal all Tesla's ideas put them in a white and silver rectangular box with round corners and fanboys will buy them the day they come out.

They'll also lock the car's features down so that the driver can't modify it and has to pay for a variety of shovelware apps to get anything done, and people will call it progress.

Tyler H wrote:

drdisque wrote: I won't consider any sort of electric vehicle until they make one with a size in between tiny and humongous that actually has good driving dynamics. It's certainly possible, it just hasn't been a priority.

The problem is that people don't buy the cars they NEED, they buy the cars they WANT. Cars always have and always will be status symbols. People that want hybrid or electric cars seem to want to advertise that fact. I have to think that's why the Prius sells like hotcakes while the Accord, Camry, and Civic hybrids flopped. What good is a hybrid/electric vehicle without the smug emissions?

I know a couple of Volt owners. Yes they are hugely smug emitters! Almost as bad is if they owned a diesel.

I think the "cars as status symbols" thing is coming to an end as we know it - smug emissions will replace it entirely.

"Self-driving" will be used as an epithet around here, as it marks a turning point in the (de)-evolution of cars away from the driving experience. Once autonomous cars become reliable, cheap and ubiquitous, big brother's gonna make a case that driving ones own car is socially irresponsible from the standpoints of fuel economy, safety and traffic congestion. It will become harder and harder to override all our little Siri's - especially in town and on the interstate. But that's going to be a slow process that will bother my grandchildren more than I. Or maybe it won't because they'll all be buried in their virtual worlds anyway.

As for EVs? They make a ton of sense for a great many situations. In time, most people in and around big citys who can afford multiple cars will have at least one. But Alfa/Ford dude up there is entirely correct that the next big leap in battery storage is going to have to happen first. Right now, there's many more people working on that than there are working on the cure for Cancer, because the first cheap and viable cellulose/salt-water/nano-something-or-other battery is practically the holly grail of transportation and energy technology right now and will mean untold Billions of dollars in profit as well as all the greenie chips one could ask for.

In reply to B. Choate:From the point of view of this daily driver, most people under 30+/- and a whole lot of older than thirty people probably would be thrilled to have no steering wheel, turn signals, etc to interfere with their busy lives! They really want a bus without having to submit to the indignity of actually riding a bus.

I wouldn't mind it either as long as I have the power to turn the sucker off. My concern is that at a certain point that may not be an option.

I live in a big city and there's a big obstacle to about 90% of the people here (where it would make sense to own one) from owning an electric car - there's no power in their garage or near their parking space.