This is referring to the team working on the self driving functionality.

Not sure if 100% a joke or just partly but Volkswagen was probably providing the mechanical engineers who were retrofitting Lexus vehicles of the project as they had for the already-deployed driverless vans. See NYT & MacReports

Or blaming customers for problems, "You're shifting it wrong."

They would come up with a charging port that only existed in the parking lot of Apple stores

Genuinely, this is the best news I've heard in a while for the reasons you listed. Apple is already fucking up the phone industry with anti-consumer policies that become industry trends. I shudder to imagine how deeply and irrepairably they would have fucked up the car market for consumers.

A problem with apple...Like if my friend has a Toyota, i can borrow that. If they have an icar, I probably couldn't drive it because I don't have an iPhone required to start it or apple shoes required to activate the pedals. You know they'd be dicks like that.

Competition usually isn't bad. Unfortunately, Apple has a tendency to not only be terribly anti-consumer, but also tends to be a trendsetter. They do shitty things, and other companies learn from their example. Thus, the competition becomes a race to the bottom.

Apple can't compete in that space. Their schtick is producing moderately inexpensive nice looking goods for exorbitant prices that are designed to be impossible to repair by anybody with them.

Tesla has already corned the market.

Trying to block people from repairing? check, trying to block sales of used items? check. Getting rid of all the buttons for all the interfaces and making you work with a tablet in the center of the car? Check.

Apple isn't competition, Apple is a closed market, more anticompetitive than Microsoft and only undone by the degree of their control.

The fear for me was that Apple would grow quickly in the EV space due to its mainstream popularity, and then start doing the ecosystem thing so driving anything but an Apple car makes you a second-class citizen. Obviously it would only support Carplay and not Android Auto, and probably lack any sort of non-Carplay connectivity so you just can't connect your Android phone to it at all. Presumably it would also have a proprietary charger that doesn't work with other cars or vice versa.

As an engineer who's spent a good chunk of his career working on stuff that got cancelled, it's really not that bad. You're generally paid well and looked after, learn a tonne on someone else's dime, have good job prospects, a strong network of talented colleagues, plus most engineers are there for the team problem solving and challenge anyway. The final product release is just the cherry on top.

Also you can only use it on roads built by Apple!

You joke but it's not terribly far off.

Their real hope was to get Hyundai Kia to build EVs for them. While letting Apple act like they were the majority stakeholder of the deal.

I'll pass on having evil corps like Google put AI in my car.

Comma.ai is open source and does exactly what you are describing as that "head unit", not too mention is widely compatible with many car manufacturers.