Remember how a lot of people were saying that Apple wouldn’t never considered getting into the automotive market if Steve Jobs was still around? Well, it looks like that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. According to Tony Fadell, he had numerous discussion with Steve Jobs back in 2008, when Fadell was Apple’s senior vice president, about Apple releasing its own car. Although Jobs decided against moving forward with the idea at the time, it does mean that Apple has been thinking of entering the automotive market for at least seven years now.
Count Steve Jobs among those curious about what an Apple car would look like. In 2008, not too long after the Apple co-founder introduced the iPhone, Jobs was considering the possibilities of a much bigger gadget. Tony Fadell, then a senior vice president at Apple, remembers talking with Jobs about the potential for an iCar. Jobs and Fadell, who had collaborated on the iPod and iPhone, swapped ideas about car designs on multiple occasions. “We had a couple of walks,” Fadell said in an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. The pair posed hypothetical questions to each other, such as: “If we were to build a car, what would we build? What would a dashboard be? And what would this be? What would seats be? How would you fuel it or power it?” Jobs decided not to move forward at the time. The discussions took place when the American auto industry was on the verge of collapse, and Apple was busy trying to establish the iPhone as a mainstream product. “The Detroit auto industry was almost dead,” Fadell made the comments on Bloomberg TV’s Studio 1.0, which premieres Wednesday night at 9 p.m. in New York. “It was fun to kick those ideas around.”
