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A Morgan Stanley research note suggests that Google and Apple could take the lead in the future electric car landscape. The analyst, Katy Hubert, said the companies that have expertise in providing “cameras, sensors, batteries, and displays” for smartphones are looking at the electric and autonomous car segments as their next big growth engines, not to wearable technology.
The industry shift combined with the companies’ continuing integration into traditional vehicles and their future plans led Hubert to write, “we see the opportunity for technology vendors, including Google and Apple, to dominate.”
With just this snippet to go on, the word “dominate” can be read in a number of ways. Hubert could be talking about the entire electric car segment, or she could be talking about infotainment systems and human-machine interfaces within the segment. A USA Today article from earlier this year said that Apple’s electric car “Project Titan” probably isn’t a full automobile. “Don’t expect a full-fledged car,” it read, “but perhaps a dashboard or some other sort of embedded model.”
We’ve already seen that conventional automakers see smartphone integration as a vital part of the way forward. They’ve chosen to use the two dominant players to make it happen instead of doing it themselves, via Google’s Android Auto and Apple Carplay. If Hubert is correct, Google and Apple might do better building a car around their phones than automakers have done building phones into their cars.
This article originally appeared on Autoblog
