AAA wanted car company willing to build the Apple Car. The presence of Cupertino is too big and too cumbersome for anyone to agree to collaborate with the company led by Tim Cook to build the electric cars conceived in Project Titan, Apple's self-driving vehicle development program.
The last to say No to Apple was Nissan after a quick negotiation, shipwrecked even before starting.
Officially the positions are different. Nissan released an official statement on Monday that denies any negotiation with Apple for the development of an electric self-driving car (among other things, the press release triggered stock market sales which closed down by 2,84%). Unofficially though, he reveals the Financial Times, the negotiations between the two parties would have foundered after the refusal of the automaker to affix the bitten apple branding on electric vehicles built in Yokohama. Nissan therefore does not intend to participate in the creation of a product that would be marketed under the Apple brand.
According to the authoritative English newspaper, it would have been Apple that approached Nissan in recent months, but the Japanese would have revealed numerous doubts, fearing to find themselves in the role of mere assembler. "In no way are we going to change the way we make cars," al Financial Times Ashwani Gupta, the chief operating officer of Nissan – How we design, how we develop and how we produce will be as an automaker, like Nissan.”
For the same reason, before Nissan had already rejected Apple's proposal too the Korean house Hyundai and its subsidiary Kia.
What do the big European houses say in this context? Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen he said he's not worried about the possible arrival of an Apple Car: "The automotive industry is not a typical technology sector that you can conquer in one fell swoop," Diess said in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. “Apple will master it overnight,” he added. Carlos Tavares, CEO of Stellantis, instead made it known that he is available to collaborate with big tech companies, as long as an equal relationship is built, which, according to the rumors on the conditions required by Cupertino, would automatically exclude Apple from the games.
