Watch out Tesla! “NO ONE knows who’s running it, but a mysterious electric car company is building a billion-dollar manufacturing plant and poaching the best minds in the auto world.” (NASDAQ: TSLA) I thought the theory that it was apple behind it was interesting. It would seem to line up in several ways. I think you could tell by looking for software engineers at the company. If there are none posted on LinkedIn then it would further line up, as the work is presumably being done at Cupertino. Using Michael Faraday’s name is about as appropriate as the modern Thomas Edison using Tesla’s name for his company. Faraday worked his way from repetitively modest means to the scientific elite of Europe by taking on the role of another scientist’s valet to get his foot in the door. Once in, he did VERY well, proving to be one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. Beyond his work with magnets and electro-magnetics, he was a chemist of renown. He was offered a knighthood which he turned down citing a Biblical prohibition of accumulating wealth. The crown offered him a house free of rent and upkeep for his services which he accepted and yet when the crown asked him to assist in the creation of chemical weapons for the Crimean War, he refused on ethical grounds. If they are using his name, I hope it’s with the grace and respect that he deserves rather than a cute alliteration that gets us closer to the iCar. If They REALLY wanted to get us talking, they would call the new car the Tucker ’15 For those who have a hard time believing Apple would get into a low margin business like making cars. That assumes that the car single is a business, not an overall part of an ecosystem. Your car knows where you are going, where you have been, what you listened to along the way. Additionally, it knows the road conditions and congestion and who knows what else. In the big-data business, having a car run off your company’s OS could be a gold data mine. There are already systems out there for Android and Linux cars (and probably Bosch is working on one), having a flagship that works off of an Apple OS would not be bad. The same argument could be made for Microsoft, for that matter. A less likely (but fun) scenario is that this is Tesla finally looking to make a mass-market version of their car, but wanting a different plate so as not to dilute the Tesla brand.