Fiat CEO advises Apple against building a car on its own

apple car concept

Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne has a piece of advice for Apple regarding Silicon Valley’s worst-kept secret that it is building an electrical vehicle: don’t do it on your own but if you must, have an established car maker mass produce a custom vehicle for you according to your specifications.

“If they have any urges to make a car, I’d advise them to lie down and wait until the feeling passes,” Marchionne told journalists at the Geneva auto show.

“Illnesses like this come and go, you will recover from them, they’re not lethal,” he added.

Building cars is a “complex business,” he said before suggesting that there was sufficient capacity available among car makers to deal with Apple’s requirements.

Here’s former GM Vice Chairman calling Apple’s purported car project “a gigantic money pit” in an interview with CNBC in September 2015.

It was previously reported that Tim Cook and other Apple executives visited BMW’s i3 assembly plant in Leipzig, Germany in autumn 2014 to discuss the possibility of using the i3 as the basis for its own vehicle.

Meanwhile, Apple has quietly leased a 96,000-square-foot site in Sunnyvale, California which used to be Pepsi’s bottling plant. The facility is located in the neighborhood of a complex of warehouses and offices that Apple leased a year ago.

Apple’s electric vehicle project is reportedly developed in secrecy under code-name Project Titan. The initiative was led by Apple’s Vice President of Product Design, Steve Zadesky, who recently left the company for personal reasons.

When asked about Project Titan at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting last Friday, Tim Cook said, “Do you remember when you were a kid, and Christmas Eve, it was so exciting, you weren’t sure what was going to be downstairs? Well, it’s going to be Christmas Eve for a while.”

Source: Reuters