According to a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the Apple Car, code-named Project Titan, is officially dead. The company has finally decided to kill off its electric car plan after a long battle and will be moving some people on the team to work on generative AI efforts.
The news was reportedly announced today by Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams to the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project. These workers will now instead be moved to John Giannandrea’s team, which is responsible for Apple’s artificial intelligence. Some layoffs were also involved, though it is unclear how many. Bloomberg also suggests that this will be a “bombshell” loss, as the company once made this a “multibillion-dollar effort”
The Apple Car project has been around since 2014, but the writing was on the wall in more recent times. Rumors from last year indicated that Apple was scaling back the project, and possibly moving away from the fully automatic technologies once involved in the project in favor of what you’d get in a more traditional electric car, with the release set for 2026 or even 2028. Now we know that this will never come to be, all at the hands of Apple executives.= who were pressing to cancel the project.
It always was strange to see a technology company like Apple efforts invest in automotive technologies and burst above giants like Tesla and Toyota. The car now will forever live in the junkyards of the dream clouds, while Apple works on more urgent matters like generative AI, which is now a big theme in the technology works and possibly set to be part of features in iOS 18 and iPadOS 18.
What Apple car??? LOL Lee, what happened? 👀
I would have loved to see it happen, it probably would have been “insanely great”. But I understand the reasoning behind it.