Over the past few months it has been rumored again and again that Apple is considering making a car, a product that the company has never made before, it would be entering an industry that’s significantly different than the one it has been operating in for decades. Apparently the company didn’t just decide one day that it should build a car, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs actually thought about making one way back in 2008 when the company riding the popularity wave brought on by the newly released iPhone.
This was revealed by Nest CEO Tony Fadell in an interview with Bloomberg, at that time Fadell was a senior executive at Apple. Fadell says that he and Steve Jobs talked about the idea of making a car multiple times. “We had a couple walks, and this was in 2008, about if we were to build a car, what would we build? What would a dashboard be? What would seats be? How would you fuel or power it?” he says.
It can’t really be said for sure how seriously the company took this idea back then, but from what Fadell reveals in the interview, the idea never really took off. He says it always came down to the fact that the company was already too busy with what it was doing, it was constrained, and while they thought it would be great to build a car they just couldn’t spend their energies on such a massive undertaking while the iPhone was still in its infancy and the iPad hadn’t even come out yet.
Now though it’s believed that Apple is serious about making a car and it’s going to be one that’s all-electric. It still might take a lot of time before the company is able to roll one out, making a car isn’t as easy as launching an “S” variant of an iPhone, and for all we know the company might never decide to take the project beyond the prototype phase.
