Detroit Warned Apple About Making a Car. It Had to Learn the Hard Way.

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By Tim Higgins

(The Wall Street Journal) — The Car Guys warned Apple that the metal-bashing business could be a tough, low-margin game. But nobody wanted to listen to a bunch of dinosaurs from Detroit.

Instead, Apple joined the hoopla in Silicon Valley around the idea that a new era of the automobile was emerging, one that would seamlessly marry software and hardware and make the old guard obsolete.

In the end, for Apple, it seems making its own car turned out to be as difficult as doing its own television set. The TV dream died years ago while Apple executives just told their team this week that the work to bring out an electric vehicle was canceled, too.

The latest retreat underscores just how unlikely Elon Musk’s success with Tesla has been. To take an EV startup founded 20 years ago and turn it into a proper car company on pa-ce to sell almost as many vehicles annually as BMW would have been hard to imagine when Apple began its own car project a decade ago.