Electric car company Tesla would welcome the competition from Apple if it decided to step into the vehicles market – and quashed rumors that Apple have been stealing all their employees.
At their most recent quarterly earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said “I certainly hope Apple gets into the car business, that would be great”. This comes as a bit of a surprise, considering the power Apple has to potentially change and dominate any market they wish to step into. Maybe he thinks Apple’s involvement could help to further popularize electric cars as a whole, which would be a boost to his company too. Or maybe he’s just hoping for some good old-fashioned healthy competition.
Suggestions of a mass exodus from Tesla to Apple seem to have been wildly overblown – in fact, Musk notes that in actual fact the employees seem to be traveling the other way. He said that a quick search on LinkedIn reveals that in the last year, “around five times as many people” have moved from Apple to Tesla than in the other direction.
There are rumors that Apple has been working on a secret project, ‘Titan’, which may be a car planned for release in 2020. It’s more likely that they are simply working to improve their existing CarPlay service, but maybe this encouragement from a potential rival will be enough to stir Apple into action?
Source: 9to5mac
Further reading: The Apple Car: will it ever happen?