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by friedman23 2003 days ago
why? they have the experience manufacturing huge numbers of vehicles and apple has the experience manufacturing products with good experience and build quality. Get gm to build the drivetrain and the body to apple spec, apple builds the interior themselves.
3 comments

Why does Apple want the UAW contracts that come with any of the Big 3?

Tesla showed the preferable model (from the corporate perspective). Buy the factory (NUMMI), hire some of the ex-UAW workers, and go from there. They don't need the whole hog.

Plus if Apple really wants GM drivetrains, they can just buy crates them. GM's not going to turn down sales of any kind in this climate.

They do have all the the ingredients, but they have a ton of financial baggage. Apple won't buy an automaker to manufacture cars, they'll contract it out for sure, the same way they do with the rest of their hardware.
Electric cars are really simple to make (Apple doesn't need the help). GM is a legacy business with a legacy business model selling dozens of indistinguishable cars via multiple competing dealerships. Its both terrible for customers and not compatible with Apple. The reason GM is priced so low is because its half obligations and dead weight. I would not personally want to bail out the doubtlessly billions of dollars of unfunded pension obligations of GM as an investment (ie, why should apple pay for the people who last worked at GM a decade ago?). Cleaning up that mess would take serious, distracting, decade long effort if its even possible.

Apple should poach the best employees from the industry, not the companies. They could probably straight up double everyone's salary and still pay less than SV engineers. I'd also look to buy out some manufacturers in the supply chain.

> Electric cars are really simple to make

Simple compared to what? They're way more complex than anything Apple makes now.