Volkswagen CEO Diess 'not afraid' of an Apple electric car

Authored by reuters.com and submitted by wewewawa

FILE PHOTO: Volkswagen Group Chief Executive Officer Herbert Diess gestures as he speaks during a news conference to announce the appointment of Wayne Griffiths as the new president of Volkswagen's Spanish brand SEAT, in Barcelona, Spain September 23, 2020. REUTERS/Albert Gea

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Germany’s Volkswagen is not concerned by any Apple plans for a passenger vehicle that could include the iPhone maker’s battery technology, its chief executive Herbert Diess said.

Reuters reported in December that Apple may have progressed enough to build a vehicle for mass markets by 2024, helped by cost cuts in battery technology.

“The car industry is not a typical tech-sector that you could take over at a single stroke,” Diess was quoted as saying an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

“Apple will not manage that overnight,” he added.

While Apple’s plans are not public, Diess said its intentions as such were “logical” because the company had expertise in batteries, software and design, and that it had deep pockets to build on these competencies.

“Still, we are not afraid,” he said.

Volkswagen plans to develop software needed for autonomous cars in-house to ensure it can compete against tech firms in the field of electric car data.

yum_raw_carrots on February 14th, 2021 at 18:20 UTC »

Making 5,000 vehicles a week that all work as expected requires enormous organisation and supplier management. It requires vast resources to develop quality systems and designs for the widespread usage cases that customers rightly demand.

It’s not the design or the software that will catch out a start up, it’s the engineering and anyone that assumes they can just buy it and be up and running in a year - think again. The facilities needed for development are huge.

CD6730 on February 14th, 2021 at 17:53 UTC »

Surely it's his job to say this

A10110101Z on February 14th, 2021 at 16:58 UTC »

I thought he died