For several years now, Apple has been pouring a ton of money and manpower into an on-again, off-again automotive project called Project Titan. The car was purported to be a potential “next big thing” for Apple to follow iconic consumer products like the iPhone.
That project — which at various points reportedly involved everything from the creation of a completely autonomous vehicle to a more conventional electric car — is no more.
Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman reported on February 27th that Apple has officially shut down the car project and informed the 2,000 employees working on it that Project Titan is no more. Those employees will reportedly either be let go or moved to other projects within the company; Apple is reportedly shifting focus to its artificial intelligence effort, so many people on the car project are allegedly headed to it.
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Apple had reportedly already delayed and scaled back its ambitious car project
Bloomberg had already reported that Apple had pushed back the Apple Car’s launch date to 2028 from 2026. And the car was not going to be as cool or groundbreaking as many people had hoped.
Apple’s car program had been targeting Level 4 autonomy, which would mean the car could drive itself on public roads. Achieving that could have meant launching a car without a steering wheel and pedals. Elon Musk keeps promising that technology is just around the corner from Tesla. But most industry players are coming to the realization it’s far further away than we thought.
According to Bloomberg, Apple had ratcheted back those ambitions to launch the Apple Car with Level 2+ driver assistant software — similar to GM’s hands free Super Cruise technology. Level 4 autonomy would have come later — perhaps to cars that were already hardware ready for it.
Without Level 4 autonomous driving, an Apple car never made much sense
Developing a car is expensive and labor intensive. Building cars at scale is a painstaking logistical nightmare — especially if, like Apple, you’d be starting up supply chains from scratch. It’s not a forgiving or — if you’re not turning out five-figure profits on trucks and SUVs — lucrative industry.
The software was the key feature. Game-changing self-driving technology could have been distinctive, lucrative and made an Apple car effort worthwhile. Without self-driving, it’s hard to see what the point of an Apple Car was.
Would even better integration with next-gen Carplay be worth the reported six-figure price tag? An Apple-designed exterior? It’s unclear what the value add from Apple to an already well-established industry would have been or whether Apple even had a clear plan of what that would be.
