Apple has decided to abandon one of its ambitious and long-running autonomous electric car projects in the history of the company known as “Project Titan.”
Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, who first reported the project’s cancellation, citing people who asked not to be identified, said that the news about the discontinuation of the project was announced internally on Tuesday.
The news was shared by Jeff Williams, Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, and Kevin Lynch, the Vice President in charge of Titan, to the nearly 2,000-person team working on the Apple car project.
Many car team employees, known as the Special Projects Group (SPG), will be shifted to Apple’s generative AI (artificial intelligence) division under John Giannandrea, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy. Also, a part of the team may even join the Apple Vision Pro team.
On the other hand, several hundred hardware engineers and vehicle designers working on the Apple car team will have 90 days to find a reassignment to other roles inside the company, or else they will be released from Apple if they aren’t able to find anything. The exact number of layoffs remains unclear at this moment.
Project Titan
The Apple electric car project (codenamed “Titan”) was rumored to have been approved by Apple’s CEO Tim Cook in late 2014. The company reportedly invested several billions of dollars into both fully autonomous vehicles that do not have a steering wheel or pedals as well as electric cars to take on the likes of Tesla. As of 2018, around 5,000 employees were reported to be working on the Apple car project.
However, leadership changes, inconsistent plans and approaches, along with a decrease in the demand for EVs only plagued the development of the vehicle.
While it is unclear why Apple is abandoning the project, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says “the decision was finalized this month by Apple’s top executives after the project reached a make-or-break point. The company spent years changing strategy in an effort to save the effort.”
The company even planned to delay the car’s launch date from 2026 to 2028 and reduce the self-driving capabilities of its vehicle but eventually went on to kill the Apple car project that reportedly remained in “pre-prototype” stages for almost a decade.
