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Coming soon... the iCar?

24 February 2015

Over the past few weeks the tech-wires have been buzzing with speculation that Apple is about to plunge head-long into the electric car (EV) market.

Fueling this speculation are reports that Apple has hired some of Tesla's workers and is now facing a lawsuit from A123 Systems who allege that a handful of its top engineers have also been poached by the iPad maker.

To date, Apple has made no announcements and there is always the possibility that all these new "battery expert" employees will simply be focused on creating better ways of powering the growing number of portable i-devices. However, Apple has made no secret of its intention to invest heavily in the development of an iOS-based in-car-management system to be known as "CarPlay".

The jump from tablet and smartphone maker to manufacturing full-blown EVs seems to me to be too big a jump even for Apple.

I suspect that if there is such a thing as an iCar under development, only select components, and perhaps styling, will come from Apple themselves.

My money is on Apple choosing instead to become a key supplier of critical systems to the EV market. In-car entertainment systems and perhaps (at a stretch) the same autonomous capabilities that Google is currently working on are about all I'd expect to see from them.

Partnering with an existing player (such as Toyota or perhaps a US-brand) would be a much better bet if there is really a desire to go head-to-head with the likes of Tesla.

Or maybe Apple has simply seen the huge potential for large-scale lithium battery manufacturing, as we enter the second half of the second decade of the 21st century.

With all contemporary EVs highly reliant on cost-effective, high performance battery systems, Apple may have decided to diversify into an area where it can be both a manufacturer and a consumer. All those iPads, Airbook, iPods, iPhones and other portable devices need batteries with a high energy density. He who owns the batteries owns the market.

As I wrote recently, there's also a massive nascent market for domestic/business energy storage in the form of battery-based systems capable of storing off-peak electricity or electricity generated from renewable sources. Ownership of a large battery manufacturing facility would also give Apple a huge chunk of that market.

So will we see an iCar by 2020 as many are predicting or will we see the iBattery instead?

I'm betting on the latter -- what do readers think?

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