In this partnership, Apple allegedly offered its expertise in heat management and advanced battery packs.
Reports have now surfaced that Cupertino tech giant Apple covertly formed an association with China’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer, BYD, for numerous years to help the latter develop long-range batteries. According to some unnamed sources familiar with the matter, the move is an effort to outperform Tesla’s growth in China.
The Bloomberg report added that the partnership between the giants commenced in 2017, which focused on increasing the production capacity of EV batteries on a large scale using lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells. Mark Gurman’s report in Bloomberg clarified that although Apple does not own any technologies used in BYD’s ongoing battery manufacturing, the association indicates how far the Cupertino tech giant can go to foray into the EV business.
Previous reports even highlighted that Apple spent around $1 billion over a year on its vehicle project before discarding the idea in the trash can in February. It is speculated that BYD offered its expertise in manufacturing skills and improvements in LFP technology, while Apple offered its expertise in heat management and advanced battery packs.
Alexander Hitzinger, a notable automotive engineer previously at Porsche and Volkswagen, was in charge of Apple’s project, while Mujeeb Ijaz, a well-known battery technology expert team of about 50 battery engineers, likely worked on innovations such as solid-state batteries—crucial for Apple’s potential EV plans. As the vice president of BYD’s battery business, Michael He was a critical link between BYD—a leader in EV batteries—and Apple’s development team.
Although the partnership between the two is supposedly no longer in operation, it seems that Apple seized valuable experience from this project, which led to the development of other products like the Vision Pro headset and the Neural Engine AI processor.
The Blade battery technology, a signature of BYD has been used significantly in all its EVs, which helped it to beat Tesla to become the globe’s largest EV seller with sales mounting 179,054 vehicles in 2020 to 3 million in 2023.
