Toyota is heavily investing and committed to launch their own groundbreaking Arene OS solution through the Toyota's Woven Planet Group starting in 2025.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...

They've hired a ton of foreign software engineers into the woven group. If anything I wonder if woven's biggest impact will have been ease of hiring talent.

Apple has already publicly torpedoed their relationship with one major manufacturer (Hyundai/Kia). It's suspected that the same thing has happened less publicly with others like Nissan. They've supposedly been talking with Toyota for a bit, but that's always been a weird choice because Toyota leadership has never fully bought into the idea of electric vehicles and SV development styles, nor are they likely to enjoy being treated the way Apple tends to treat "suppliers". They also have their own development units for this, like GM and most of the German manufacturers.

I don't really care about electric vehicles either -- I think Toyota has its head on straight in this regard. Hybrids are fantastic. Electric vehicles are an important subset of the market, but Toyota makes vehicles that people rely on in the remotest and roughest parts of the world. If you're running drugs in the mountains of El Salvador or running from rebels in the Congo then you want a Toyota, not a Tesla.

I saw my share of Toyota Prius's and light trucks when I was working in Central Asia/Siberia, but I'm not sure it's relevant to the apple car discussion. It's generally thought that project titan is an electric vehicle (and my limited knowledge of the project from their various efforts to recruit me supports this), nor are ruggedized products Apple's traditional market. Offroad capabilities also don't make much sense in the context of a consumer-focused self-driving vehicle given the limited utility and difficulty compared even to on-road usage. It's more of a DoD research area at the moment.

So Toyota makes a strange bedfellow for Apple here.

My point is that cars made by Toyota don't break down like the cars made by other companies do.

The self-driving thing is still 20 years away.

Like many things, it's a question of definitions. There are already cars on the road operating commercial autonomous services. It's new and immmature, but in a very real sense "self-driving" is already here. L5 or offroad might still be decades out from initial introduction.

Toyota already makes cars that work really well and the company as a whole is undervalued (less than 1/3 of what TSLA is valued at). The point is for Apple to get into a huge market and make a ton of money with a best-in-class product. And no, self-driving is not already here.

Right, give up all control over infotainment to Apple of all companies - that'll surely work well for them.

At least with something open source they retain some control. Besides Toyota has already got you and me both because they're who they are - and part of that is they are actively involved with their suppliers and even own them in part.

Wouldn't having the largest fleet of cars in the world be great for Apple Maps? That would be an fantastic way to disrupt Google from that space.

If you want to you can already use Apple maps via carplay on Toyotas. What would be the benefit to Toyota for forcing Apple maps on their customers for the small portion of vehicles people now a days buy with separate navigation system?

The benefit to Apple would be getting massive amounts of information about roads and traffic conditions for their maps so that they would be better than they are now. The benefit to Toyota would be getting world-class mapping software and great usability design.

How much would it cost for Apple to take a 10% stake in Toyota? Doesn't Apple have a couple hundred billion dollars just lying around in cash?

That would be around $19 billion and Apple has around $40 billion on hand. Although I think the culture of Japan would cause more difficulties other than having enough money to afford it.

why buy 10% of Toyota when they could buy 100% of Ford (49.7bn market cap) with 90% cash on hand.

Because Toyota makes reliable cars. As I noted above, I would never buy a car that is not a Toyota. If you want to be flashy, you get a BMW, but it you want to fight a war in the Middle East you get a Toyota Land Cruiser. Don't dismiss the reliability of Toyotas -- they really have it figured out.

...or Toyota could just use Android Automotive, which exists today as a full OS for cars.

Adding wireless CarPlay would be a great start.