According to Bloomberg, Apple has canceled its electric car project. The move would be announced internally by Apple COO Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, who have been leading the Apple Car project since 2021. “Apple executives finalized the decision in recent weeks,” the report said. The project had reached a “breaking point” within Apple, with CEO Tim Cook pressured by shareholders to make a decision one way or the other.
The Apple Car team, code-named Project Titan, includes over 2,000 people. Some will move to the AI sector led by John Giannandrea, some may “apply for positions in other teams”, but “there will be layoffs”, according to Bloomberg, although it is not yet known how many there will be.
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History
Apple has been working on an electric car since at least 2014. There has never been an official announcement, but CEO Tim Cook has hinted at Apple’s interest in the automotive sector several times, going so far as to claim in an interview with Wall Street Journal that it would be not only “an evolution, but an epochal change”. In November 2016, the company submitted a request to the US Highway Safety Authority (NHTSA) to develop a car capable of moving autonomously. More: he had asked the authorities to guarantee “fair competition” between the latest arrivals (them) and the giants of the automotive sector (Tesla or General Motors). In a blunt direct statement, an Apple spokesperson hinted that the company was working on an autonomous system that could be used to “transform the future of transportation” by leveraging artificial intelligence. There was talk of “significant benefits to humanity from automated vehicles”, described as “technologies capable of saving lives and potentially preventing millions of car accidents resulting in thousands of deaths every year”. The company’s initial goal was to create a completely autonomous car, without steering wheels or pedals, but the project had been scaled down in the latest versions and the controls would have been traditional, albeit with an advanced level of autonomous driving. Recently, it was Bloomberg who revealed that Cook planned to launch the car by 2028, with a price list of around 100,000 dollars.
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Hiring and acquisitions
The Apple Car project was led by Doug Field, who at Tesla had been responsible for the launch of the Model Three. In 2013, Musk took him away from Apple, where he was vice president of hardware. Field then returned to Cupertino in 2018 called by Tim Cook to manage Apple Car, but in September 2021 he left the company again, this time for Ford. Also part of the team was Manfred Harrer, from Porsche, responsible for the Cayenne operation.
Apple bought car kit startup Drive.ai in 2019, acquiring dozens of employees, cars and other assets to add to the Project Titan autonomous vehicle development team. Even before that, it signed a deal with Volkswagen to convert a number of T6 Transporter vans into autonomous shuttles for the Palo Alto to Infinite Loop pilot program.
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The Dyson experience
Dyson had also tried to develop its own car, thanks to the aerodynamic studies that led to the birth of cyclonic vacuum cleaners, and its long experience in electric motors. “It was a commercial mistake – founder James Dyson told Italian tech in an interview – however we are very proud of the car, where we have developed many innovations that sooner or later we will make public. It was a good car, but they couldn’t be sure we would ever get back our investments. (…) We have worked a lot in this sector, using new technologies; we won’t use them for a car, but they will be used for other products.” Well, the same could happen with Apple: even if there won’t be an Apple car, Cupertino is already present in the world of four wheels with CarPlay, the system that allows the car to interact with Apple devices. And be careful, for some time now it’s no longer just about music or podcasts: Apple also offers the possibility of using its interface to monitor various parameters of the car and to use various commands.
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