Poaching Tesla
There are some errors here:<p>&gt; The dramatic shift to SUVs in the U.S. is driven by consumers caring less about traditional car value metrics such as performance.<p>The cause of this was exactly the opposite -- the CAFE rules classify SUVs as trucks and allow them to fall into a less stringent fuel economy standard. The result allows SUVs to be mass-market gasoline-powered large vehicles with powerful engines, which is no longer possible for things classified as cars. That factor is primarily what caused (big-engined) SUVs to replace station wagons and large performace sedans in the market, and the small car market is as strong as it ever was.<p>He also calls Ives a visionary more than once, but that was Jobs. Apple has done well under Ives because of his management ability, not his ability to develop new product markets as Jobs did.<p>Project Titan is a huge gamble. They&#x27;re essentially trying to buy their way into a market where their competitors have a head start. Apple has the cash to potentially succeed doing that, but they could also spend billions and have it come to nothing, and it&#x27;s not clear what they&#x27;re adding that Waymo or Telsa or Uber doesn&#x27;t already have. It seems to be some combination of &quot;Google is doing it&quot; and the fact that Steve Jobs saw that Telsa was onto something -- but there has been ten years of progress between then and now.<p>And the speculation that Apple will focus on personalization is odd. Their model is walled-garden, curation, single USB port on the MacBook, everything soldered and nothing modular, any color you want as long as it&#x27;s black. If anything vehicle personalization is going to become <i>less</i> prevalant with autonomous vehicles as it makes it easier to share vehicles if they can show up at the location of whichever part-owner needs it at a given time, or be leased out for ride sharing when not in use.