| Only if you answer their "survey question"... I hope they quickly fall in their rankings on large search engines... Here's the article's text: ---- Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, has lashed out at Apple‘s ambitions to make a car that could rival his Tesla electric vehicles. Mr Musk said Apple had only hired Tesla engineers that the carmaker had fired, dismissing the idea they were important employees. “We always jokingly called Apple the ‘Tesla Graveyard’. If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple,” he told the German newspaper Handelsblatt as he toured Berlin. “I’m not kidding.” The chief executive of Tesla, who also leads Space company SpaceX and chairs alternative energy company SolarCity, mocked Apple’s ambitions to build a smart car, laughing and saying: “Did you ever take a look at the Apple Watch?” “No, seriously: It’s good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can’t just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car,” he said. Apple has shown signs of preparing to create a car this year, including recruiting experts in automotive technology and vehicle design, asking a test site for autonomous and connected cars when they had availability for a test and buying a big data analytics mapping company. In May, Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice-president of operations, said the car was the “ultimate mobile device”, hinting that the company could be working on one. Most recently, Apple executives met with officials from California’s automotive regulator to discuss self-driving vehicles. An Apple car — smart or even driverless — could threaten existing carmakers, from Detroit and Germany to newer companies such as Tesla. GM last week laid out plans to take on Google and Apple in self-driving cars, saying it was well placed to be a ‘disrupter’. Mr Musk said that for Apple, designing a car would be “the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation”. Taking a dig at the products Apple launched last month, he said: “A new pencil or bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough.” Apple did not respond to a request for comment. |