After all the fruity cargo cult knows a bit about marketing and design but it knows nothing about car building. BMW and Daimler also have that reassuring expensive German precision vibe about them.

However it looks like the talks have fallen apart. Firstly BMW walked away from the talks and then Daimler. The issue appears to be the fact that neither car company was particularly impressed with the way Apple wanted to run things.

According to the Techcrunch  “Apple wants the car to be closely built into its own cloud software, while the German carmakers have made customer data protection a key element of their future strategy.”

Ironic that preserving customer data was an issue when Apple makes such a big deal about protecting customer data lately. Still it does speak buckets about Apple’s ability to work with other industries. It managed to bully the content industry over music sales, something that has not happened since and then tried to do a deal with the publishing industry which got it in trouble with the monopoly authorities. Whatever its approach it took with the German carmakers, they were not having any of it.

Apple has since visited Austria to speak with Magna Steyr as another possible candidate. If the manufacturer does what it is told, er... agrees to be an Apple partner, then Jobs’ Mob might get its car made.