“The car industry is not a typical tech sector that you could take over at a single stroke,” Diess said in an interview with German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Apple will not manage that overnight.”
In April 2017, Apple received a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test self-driving vehicles there.
“There’s just so much going on in [electric and autonomous vehicles] and connected tech,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to investors in December 2020. “It is perhaps a fitting time of the world’s most valuable company to play its hand in the $10 trillion global mobility market.”
Although that’s less than half the number of sales Tesla made last year, it represents an increase of 214% on the previous year and shows Germany’s huge auto industry is beginning to mount a challenge to the leader in electric cars.
That’s why, when it comes to competition from Apple, “We are not afraid,” Diess told the German newspaper.
— CNN Business’ Clare Duffy and Charles Riley contributed to this report.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/14/tech/volkswagen-ceo-apple/index.html
CNN – CNN INTERNATIONAL
