Apple was secretly working with Chinese company BYD on a battery for long-range electric vehicles

(Bloomberg) — Apple Inc. worked with Chinese automaker BYD Co. for years as part of its now-cancelled car project, developing long-range batteries that helped lay the foundation for the technology used today, people familiar with the situation say .

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Apple and the Shenzhen-based company teamed up around 2017 to build a battery system using lithium iron phosphate cells, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the effort was not disclosed. The technology was intended to offer greater range and greater safety than standard electric vehicle batteries at the time.

Although Apple doesn't have the technology used in BYD's current Blade batteries, the partnership shows how far the iPhone maker has gone in its efforts to produce a car. The tech giant spent around $1 billion a year over the past decade on the vehicle project – often seen as one of the company's “next big things” – before scrapping it in February.

According to the people, the technology that Apple developed with BYD would have been heavily adapted to the vehicle that was once planned. As part of the secret partnership, Apple engineers contributed expertise in advanced battery packs and thermal management, it said. BYD contributed manufacturing know-how and advances in the use of lithium iron phosphate cells – better known as LFP.

Spokespeople for Apple and BYD declined to comment on the joint battery work. But BYD said in an emailed statement that “the concept for the blade battery came from BYD engineers who independently developed this LFP blade battery.” BYD owns all ownership and patent rights to the blade battery .”

Today, BYD's entire vehicle lineup is powered by the Blade system, which uses a battery pack design that was informed by lessons learned from Apple's work, according to people involved in its development.

The foundation for Apple's BYD collaboration was laid about a decade ago when the US company was looking for core technologies for its car. BYD engineers previewed early versions of the Blade battery to Apple executives, who admired the technology's safety and energy storage capabilities. Ultimately, Apple was looking for tweaks that could increase the range of an electric vehicle, the people said.

At this point, Apple, based in Cupertino, California, had already been working on several different batteries that used elements such as nickel and alkaline. Millions of dollars have also been invested in the development and construction of battery packs to accommodate as many cells as possible. The two companies wanted to combine the separate pack and cell efforts to produce a safe, long-range battery system for the Apple vehicle.

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On the Apple side, the collaboration was led by Alexander Hitzinger, a former Volkswagen AG and Porsche executive who led product design for the car project from 2016 to 2019. The company had also hired Mujeeb Ijaz, a veteran of failed American battery startup A123 Systems LLC, who worked at Apple from 2014 to 2020.

Ijaz led a team of about 50 battery engineers working on the project. His counterpart at BYD was Michael He, vice president of the company's battery business.

The Blade has now become a distinctive feature of BYD cars – and an important selling point. The company leveraged its improved range, relative safety and lower costs to generate sales of 3 million electric and hybrid vehicles in 2023, up from 179,054 three years earlier.

The company is now the top-selling automaker in China and briefly overtook Tesla Inc. to become the world's leading electric vehicle provider. BYD founder and CEO Wang Chuanfu, himself a battery engineer, is a billionaire.

Despite years of working with BYD, Apple backed away from the partnership and considered systems from other battery makers, the people said. The entire car project suffered numerous delays and the economics of the electric vehicle business eventually proved too daunting.

When Apple canceled the car project, it marked a rare and high-profile failure for the world's most valuable company. But the decades-long endeavor proved useful in some ways. Beyond the battery insights gained through the effort, it helped develop products like the Vision Pro headset and the Neural Engine AI processor that's in most Apple devices today. The work has also contributed to the company's nascent push into robotics.

– With assistance from Danny Lee.

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