[pmontra]

> Are they going to outsource it to Foxconn like they do with the iPhone, and ship them across the Pacific? Doesn't seem feasible.

There is the example of this Italian car sharing service http://www.sharengo.it/

They designed their own car and a Chinese company built it.

[mikeash]

Cool! Do you know who built it and how many they're making?

[pmontra]

To answer your question I googled the Italian web and found more details than I knew. The story is a little different and I couldn't put together all the pieces of the puzzle.

According to the sources the cars are either designed in Italy and made in China or designed by a Chinese company with Italian designers (not only the style, but at least the navigation system and battery management).

I found some references to the Xin Da Yang Electric Vehicles and the Shandong Xindayang Electric Vehicle companies, which should be part of the same group anyway. The model is called ZD1 and it's a custom version of the iCar0 http://greengomoving.it/prodotti/ That car was sold in Italy at 13 k EUR but didn't sell enough. The business was relaunched as car sharing and it's doing well enough judging from the number of cars I see around. I plotted the invoice numbers against time and it's a line, which could be OK given it's limited to a few cities and they have competitors. They could already have saturated the market unless they open in other cities.

I think they have at most 2000 cars in Italy but the Chinese companies could be making more. I found it on alibaba https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/China-eec-l7e-80-elec... They say up to 5000 cars per month, unit price up to 8000 USD.

Sources, all of them in Italian

http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/motori/2015-05-21/share-ngo-p...

http://www.veicolielettricinews.it/sharengo-il-primo-car-sha...

http://www.alvolante.it/news/milano-il-car-sharing-elettrico...

[mikeash]

Awesome, thanks so much for all that information. Maybe I'm too pessimistic about the possibility of outsourced car manufacturing after all. Seeing a car on freakin' Alibaba sure gives me a different perspective on it. Apple would need a whole different kind of scale, of course, but that's something the Chinese do well.

[pmontra]

Not necessarily. Apple could sell those cars or operate a car sharing service. In the latter case they need to build only a fraction of the cars. Ideally we'll get a self driving car that never stops, going from customer to customer like a cab. That would reduce the number of cars even further.

Whatever thwy'll be I wonder if we'll be able to operate those cars with an Android phone or they'll be iPhone only.