The Apple Car Is Dead
It’s official: you won’t get an Apple Car. According to Bloomberg , the company behind the iPhone, Mac and now the Vision Pro is scrapping plans to create self-driving electric vehicles after a decade of development.
Bloomberg reports that COO Jeff Williams and EV project vice president Kevin Lynch shared the news with the team of nearly 2,000 Apple employees working on the car. The employees were caught off guard and shared their experiences with Bloomberg on condition of anonymity because Apple had not yet made the news public.
While Apple plans to move many of those thousands of employees to generative AI jobs, it will lay off the rest. Bloomberg couldn’t say how many employees would be affected.
Brief history of the Titan project
Although Apple has never officially commented on its electric car project, codenamed Project Titan, rumors about it have been circulating for the past decade. After a long period of rumors and speculation, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2016 that Apple had hired former executive Bob Mansfield to manage the project. From there, Apple continued to hire and conduct research, and after being rejected by many major car brands , partnered with Volkswagen to develop a self-driving van .
Apple hired Doug Field , Tesla’s former vice president of engineering, in 2018, then fired more than 200 people from Project Titan in 2019 before buying up failed self-driving startup Drive.ai . Things continued to go downhill at Project Titan, with Doug Field leaving the project in 2021 , and in late 2022, Bloomberg reported that Apple had reduced its self-driving capabilities from all roads to highways only . In the same report, we learned that Apple planned to sell its car for just under $100,000, but as we know today, that won’t happen.
What does this mean for Apple?
If Apple had stepped up to the plate and released a reliable car that could compete with Tesla and other high-end EVs in, say, 2020, I think it would have been a much different story. But the fact that this project was still running in 2024 after about ten years of work means it simply didn’t work.
And honestly, I think that’s okay. Apple doesn’t need to make a car. In fact, they could take the money and resources they were spending on Project Titan and put them towards more practical endeavors. Generative AI is the focus here: Apple wasn’t prepared for the development of ChatGPT and its ilk, and is reportedly planning to introduce a lot of new AI features in updates like iOS 18 . Those thousands of Project Titan employees could certainly come in handy in this sprint, as the company still has a lot of catching up to do.
Personally, I’d like to see Apple put more resources into software in general. Its hardware team is killing it: the Mac line has arguably never been better, and you can’t go wrong with an iPhone or iPad these days. But macOS, iOS and iPadOS need some debugging and cleaning up. (I need system settings to avoid such a mess, Apple.)
It will be interesting to see whether this restructuring will have a noticeable impact on Apple’s products and services. However, the company currently employs more than 160,000 people across its divisions , so this may not be as effective as it seems, especially since Apple is making the unfortunate decision to lay off a number of these employees.