Rumours of Apple building an electric car has been flying for years, and the evidence keeps mounting up. Reuters now report that Cupertino’s top brass have made several visits to BMW facilities over the last year.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and other senior executives visited the BMW factory in Leipzig, Germany in 2014 to look into how the i3 is manufactured. The i3 is BMW’s electric “zero emissions” five-door urban hatchback, which first entered production back in 2013. During the visit, Apple executives asked BMW board members detailed questions about tooling and production and BMW executives signaled readiness to license parts, one of the sources said. News of the Leipzig visit first emerged in Germany’s Manager-Magazin last week.
“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. According to Reuters‘ source, Apple left the talks without reaching a deal with BMW because the company wants “to explore developing a passenger car on its own.” BMW itself is being cautious about sharing its manufacturing know-how because it wants to avoid becoming a mere supplier to a software or internet giant. Although there are no plans at present for jointly developing a passenger vehicle, according to BMW, one of the sources quoted by Reuters said exploratory talks between senior managers may be revived at a later stage.
Back in February, the WSJ reported that Apple had “hundreds” of employees working on the design of an “Apple-branded electric vehicle”. At the time, the car in question was tipped to be a “minivan like vehicle”. As usual, Apple has made no official comment on the matter of a custom-built car.
In March, an AppleInsider report suggested Apple was building an Apple Car – codename Project Titan – at a secret Sunnyvale campus via a shell company.
Rumours of a possible partnership that would see Apple using the body of BMW’s ‘i’ vehicles as the basis for an Apple Car, have been circulating for months.
