The first spy photo of an Apple iCar

(professional driver, closed course, do not imitate). Photo by Mark Vaughn

The company is sitting on $178 billion in cash so it might as well give it a try

Apple, the company that revolutionized music, phones and computers (but not glasses), wants to revolutionize the automobile. The Silicon Valley titan has “several hundred employees” working on building a passenger car, the Wall Street Journal said. Members of the Apple team have met with Magna Steyr in Europe, a company capable of building everything from a single ash tray to an entire run of cars.

The Apple development team is said to be considering an electric minivan as its first project, though anything more specific is not yet known, the WSJ said.

Apple, for its part, is withholding comment.

The WSJ article says the development team could be as large as 1,000 people, brought together from both inside and outside the company. The team includes product design vice president Steve Zadesky, who worked at Ford as an engineer, and Johann Jungwirth, who was head of Mercedes-Benz R&D North America. Former Ford designer Marc Newson started working at Apple last year.

Other industrial giants outside the car industry have tried building cars before, of course. Some did better than others. Apart from Tesla, and we’re still kind of waiting to see about them, almost every other carmaker startup in many, many decades has failed or been swallowed up by an existing behemoth and orphaned or simply spat out. There is rampant room for speculation as to Apple’s chances in this realm.

So let’s speculate.

It’s one thing to offer some sort of innovative Tier 2 product such as one to rival that 17-inch touchscreen panel you see in the Tesla Model S. Or some really cool turn signal lights that wiggle and undulate instead of just blinking. And an Apple team of innovators could probably figure out a million ways to stay connected on the road without crashing. All those would be an excellent outlet for Apple’s wheeled aspirations; any big carmaker that is serious about innovation would consider a partnership with Apple on that level, right? The Ford/Microsoft partnership notwithstanding.

But as for building an entire car from the stamped floorpans to the little aerodynamic bumps on the outside rearview mirrors? That’s another deal altogether. What Apple doesn’t understand is that there are something like 10,000 parts on every car, truck and SUV on the road today, and all those parts have to work every day for the life of the car. Ask Tesla about those innovative door handles.

So our free advice for Apple? Figure out how to integrate into modern automobiles the things you do well but current suppliers don’t. Get that right for a couple model year cycles, then maybe consider branching out.