BMW, Apple could rekindle courtship with an eye on car collaboration

In recent news, it has come out that Apple is probably exploring to expand its market segment to the automobile industry. BMW and Apple may rekindle a courtship put on hold after an exploratory visit by executives of Apple to the headquarters of BMW. According to Reuters Tim Cook had visited BMW’s headquarters last year and senior Apple executives toured BMW’s Leipzig factory in order to learn how the company manufactures their i3 electric car. The initial coverage of this was through a German magazine called Manager-Magazin, who reported that Apple executives had asked BMW Board members for a detailed question-answer period wherein they discussed about tooling and production and was also reported that BMW executives showed readiness to license parts.

“Apple executives were impressed with the fact that we abandoned traditional approaches to car making and started afresh. It chimed with the way they do things too,” a senior BMW source said. Hypothetically, if we say Apple does start production of its own cars, it wouldn’t really be a surprise because according to Eric Noble, president of the Car Lab (a consulting firm in Orange, Calif) Apple can easily enter the automobile industry with $202.8 billion already in cash. So if only 1 percent of Apple’s annual iPhone customers decided to order a car, it would need to make 1.69 million vehicles. To put this further into perspective, that’s more than the 434,311 vehicles Jaguar and Land Rover produced last year. Even BMW Group, which made just over 2 million cars last year, would struggle to free up capacity.