Morgan Stanley: Apple Car Will be a ‘Shared Service’

Investment bank Morgan Stanley says Apple’s anticipated car will be the “ultimate EV bear case,” impacting stocks in other auto companies, according to published reports.

But according to the bank’s auto analyst Adam Jonas, it won’t be a car that most people own.

“We believe a car without steering wheel or pedals must be a ‘shared service’ and not an ‘owned car,’” Jonas said in a note Friday (Nov. 19).

“To be clear, we do not believe consumers will own title to a fully autonomous car … but will engage in the service as a subscription or transport utility.”

This report comes one day after the news Thursday that Apple was accelerating its car project, focusing on efforts to launch a fully-driverless vehicle by 2025.

That’s a change from earlier stages of the project, which saw Apple working on two versions of the electric vehicle (EV). One had some self-driving capabilities, while the other was a completely autonomous version requiring intervention from human drivers.

Read more: Apple Speeds up Self-Driving Car Project

But even if Apple does have a self-driving car ready for sale in four years, don’t expect a lot of sales right away, Jonas writes. He said he expects fully-autonomous cars to take a few years to become big sellers industry-wide.

“We expect … vehicle penetration to ramp very slowly due to a host of technological and moral/legal/regulatory considerations,” he said. “By FY25 we forecast L5 fully autonomous vehicle sales to be roughly 100k units with the vast majority being outside of the US.”

And by 2030, Morgan Stanley predicts the global miles traveled by electric vehicles will grow to 15 trillion, compared to 12 trillion today.

Morgan Stanley estimates that drivers and passengers “spend more than 600 billion hours in cars every year.”

“What’s the value of a human hour of time traveling in an Apple car?” Jonas wrote. “We don’t know. But 600bn hours times anything is a very large number.”