Apple’s decade-long foray into developing an electric car has met its end.
The initiative codenamed “Project Titan” reportedly delivered the news of its demise to employees on Tuesday. According to Bloomberg, Apple COO Jeff Williams and VP in charge of the project Kevin Lynch shared the news internally, informing the 2,000 employees working on the project that many of them would be shifted to Apple’s work on generative. The news also means that some employees will be laid off, though the number of layoffs remains a mystery.
Lynch himself will move over to Apple’s work on generative AI under executive John Giannandrea.
The decision halts a nearly 10-year-long period of investment and development by Apple focused on producing a luxury EV utilizing its own proprietary autonomous driving software and voice-guided navigation. Apple put billions of dollars into the project in the hopes of building a competitor to Tesla as the EV market grew over the last decade. The company even brought on CJ Moore, the engineer behind Tesla’s Autopilot software and open critic of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s claims of Autopilot being “full self-driving” back in 2021.
But development on Project Titan ran into a bevy complications. According to The New York Times, Apple’s EV development was plagued by heavy employee turnover, shifting strategies and numerous instances of plans being scrapped and restarted. Key among those issues was the departure of project head Doug Field in 2021. Field left to assume the position of chief advanced technology officer with Ford as it pressed further into the EV market.
While Apple’s EV project did produce vehicles that were tested on public roads, the vehicle itself wasn’t slated to release until 2028 reportedly with a $100,000 price tag. Apple’s autonomous driving software was also falling short of stated goals with plans to reduce its specifications from Level 4 (just below fully autonomous) to Level 2+ (just above Tesla’s Autopilot software) to meet that 2028 target launch date.
The launch of the project represented Apple’s first substantial step toward expansion into a new market in quite some time, but the shuffling of employees and resources from the EV project to its generative AI development could fuel the same goal. During February’s quarterly earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook shared that the company will introduce generative AI features into its software later this year.
