Apple vs. Samsung, the 2nd game is Apple vs. Tesla. Korea Economic Daily TV

● Apple enters the autonomous vehicle market

Apple has challenged the electric vehicle market with the goal of producing self-driving cars by 2024. Foreign media reported this fact, but also said that production could be pushed after 2025 due to the aftermath of Corona 19. First, inside Apple, a car development project called’Project Titan’ has already been in operation since 2014. It has been focusing on other fields such as software, but has restarted the vehicle project since last year.

According to Apple, it devised a design to increase the capacity of the cells in the battery and add more active material instead of removing the pouch and module. This is expected to increase vehicle mileage. In addition, an Apple official said that it is working on a method of making lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries that are less likely to overheat than lithium-ion batteries. In particular, it is known that Apple has decided to procure some parts, such as the lidar sensor, which will be installed in the vehicle from outside. LiDAR refers to a technology that detects the distance to surrounding objects with light, and is a core technology that is indispensable for autonomous driving systems along with radar that detects objects with sound waves or electromagnetic waves.

● Apple only takes care of outsourcing production and core software

For now, observations prevail that Apple will cooperate with manufacturers to assemble the vehicle. On the one hand, the possibility of Apple establishing a joint venture (JV) with an existing automobile manufacturer is also revised. In this case, the possibility of developing only core software technologies such as autonomous driving systems that can be installed in automobiles cannot be excluded. There is also a prospect that it is not easy for Apple, which has no experience, to follow the know-how accumulated by existing automakers for at least several decades and at most 100 years. In fact, it took not as short as 17 years for Tesla, the leading electric vehicle manufacturer in the United States, to make stable profits from vehicle manufacturing.

● Will’Apple vs. Tesla’ become rivals in the autonomous electric vehicle market?

What Apple and Tesla are ultimately pursuing is an electric vehicle capable of fully autonomous driving. Recently, as Tesla unveiled a beta service of Full Self-Driving (FSD) that can be used on real roads, interest in Tesla’s own autonomous driving is increasing. Tesla previously launched a beta service of FSD to a small number of customers in October, and CEO Elon Musk said it will introduce a full FSD that generates additional revenue in the near future. Elon Musk also noted that if a full FSD is possible, the vehicle owner can provide unmanned taxi services, and the Tesla vehicle could become an appreciating asset that generates profits after purchase. In other words, the car was viewed as another means of generating revenue, not consumable.

Tesla’s currently released FSD technology is at the level of SAE level 2, and it is continuously updating software through OTA (Over-The-Air) every 5 to 10 days to improve autonomous driving performance. However, experts predicted that Tesla’s self-driving system with its own direction has an advantage in expanding the spread, but it is expected that it will lead to the actual commercialization of fully autonomous driving only if it overcomes technological weaknesses and institutional barriers. Experts say that Tesla FSD is technically capable of recognizing traffic lights, grasping stop signs and speed limits, entering a rotating roundabout, turning left unprotected, entering and leaving the road, etc. He pointed out that it did not meet the level 3 standards.

● The key to preoccupying the future market is’autonomous driving’

The core of the future car market is fully autonomous driving technology. The probability that a company that first completes the technology that safely moves to a designated destination without human intervention will preoccupy the future car market is absolutely high. This is in line with the reason we predicted that Apple will focus on self-driving systems instead of car body manufacturing. Looking at the results so far, it is true that Tesla, which has already accumulated more databases, has a comparative advantage over Apple, which only offers possibilities. Tesla’s accumulated mileage data is unique, reaching 5.1 billion miles in January of next year. In addition, actual driver driving data is collected in various road environments such as deserts and snowy roads, and learning about the’black swan’, an unexpected situation that can be experienced while driving, is also being conducted.

That doesn’t mean that Apple’s challenge seems reckless. This is because Apple, which has already proven its software technology in the smartphone market, raises expectations for success in the future car market. If `Apple` and `Samsung` played in the first game in the smartphone market, the second game is predicting a head-on game between `Apple` and `Tesla` in the future car market.

*[궁금타]What is This is a serial planning section where you can ride future mobility and analyze industry trends, including test drives of various new cars.