&gt; They design the manufacturing process to squeeze out nickels on the dollar and using CM means they avoid legacy overhead that weighs down behemoths like GM, VW and Toyota.<p>GM&#x27;s legacy overhead was discharged during their bankruptcy.  As to DFM and manufacturing costs, the auto market is viciously competitive, and I don&#x27;t see how newcomer Apple and their CMs are going to do something that the existing manufacturers haven&#x27;t done already to maintain competitiveness in the current market.<p>&gt; They also don&#x27;t have any legacy overhead tied to engineering around ICE. As we&#x27;ve seen with Tesla, they had to reinvent almost everything because most of the problems traditional car companies had been working on don&#x27;t exist in an all-electric vehicle.<p>Don&#x27;t know what you mean by legacy overhead wrt. ICE.  As to Tesla, that statement reads bombastic given previous efforts by others in battery electric vehicles.  Beyond previous efforts by others, I&#x27;d say that BMW has done more innovation with their i sub-brand than Tesla has done, especially wrt. vehicle weight.  Tesla does cool stuff, but the evangelism is tiring.<p>&gt; Apple designs the buying process, which for cars is nightmare fuel for most people.<p>I completely agree that the current car purchasing process sucks, even for &quot;no hassle&quot; dealers, but how much can Apple do here?  So much of the pain is finance- and paperwork-related, and even if Apple brings in their own financing, that can&#x27;t get around the legal requirements for the paperwork.<p>&gt; Carplay I haven&#x27;t used but I think you may be selling this short too…<p>I agree that CarPlay sounds like a great idea, so much so that I unceremoniously ripped out my car&#x27;s stock headunit to put in an aftermarket Pioneer unit with CarPlay a year ago.  The problem is in the execution.  Some stuff is almost magical, like automatically offering to navigate to the next appointment in my calendar; mostly though it&#x27;s frustrating because it isn&#x27;t reliable (especially in cell coverage-poor areas) and requires too much cognitive load to use.  I have no doubt that Apple could improve it, but I don&#x27;t know that the will is there because I think they would need to acknowledge that their current look and interaction paradigm aren&#x27;t suited for in-car use.<p>&gt; You talk about Apple&#x27;s materials being shoddy but that is not the impression I have (outside of charging cables). My iphone 3gs and 4s have held up very well and metal frame ipads, macbooks and iphones seem to do even better.<p>I too have had good experiences with the metals, although the stuff using 6000-series aluminum is a bit dent-prone; I have no experience with the 7000-series containing Apple devices but would naturally expect that they would do much better.  I was however specifically thinking of their PU and leather iPhone and iPad accessories: they look disgusting after only a week&#x27;s use in the lighter colors, and I was mentally picturing the touch surfaces of a car using the same materials.<p>&gt; There is plenty of room for technical gimmicks here in the auto industry and I fully expect a video of Jony Ive explaining how revolutionary it is for safety when the entire carframe is milled from a single piece of aluminum.<p>Sounds a little expensive to insure.