End of the road for Apple Car development

THE LATEST NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF APPLE

BY ALEX SUMMERSBY

APPLE HAS CANNED Project Titan, its decade–long project to develop an autonomous electric vehicle (EV).

The nearly 2,000 staff working on the project were informed at the end of February, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported. He believes some will be laid off but “many” will be transferred to work on generative AI, which Apple CEO Tim Cook recently described as “another technology we believe can redefine the future.” Cook has promised to disclose “the ways we will break new ground in generative AI” later this year.

Although the EV project was never officially announced, its existence was verified by potential manufacturing partners approached by Apple, such as Hyundai, who revealed back in 2021 that it was in talks with Apple about building a car.

Over the past ten years, however, nothing came of Apple’s talks with a whole range of automakers, including Mercedes–Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, and Tesla. Over that period, Gurman comments, Apple “toiled away on at least five different major designs, drove prototype self–driving systems for more than a million miles, [and] hired engineers and designers only to lay them off.” Despite spending “on average, roughly $1 billion annually” on the project, Gurman says, “Apple never got close to realizing its original vision, or any of its subsequent ones. It didn’t get as far as testing a full– scale prototype on public roads.”