Apple spent over $10 billion on its now abandoned Apple Car project over the last decade, according to a report from The New York Times. The report details the issues the project faced during its development. Apple first began working on the project in 2014 and announced that it had canceled the project earlier this week.
Money was spent on research and development of the vehicle, and during its lifetime, thousands of car experts and Apple engineers worked on the project. Despite the huge amount Apple spent over the project’s decade-long existence, some employees within the Cupertino company had suspicions that the project would fail from the very beginning. The project, officially codenamed “Titan,” was instead referred to by many in the company as “the Titanic disaster.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk once said he had reached out to Apple CEO Tim Cook about the possibility of the electric car maker being acquired by Apple. Musk says Cook “refused to take the meeting.”
Musk says he made the overture to Apple during “darkest days of the Model 3 program,” offering Tesla for 1/10 of its value.
Apple never could quite find the right leader for the Apple Car project, as the project had four different heads and the project was scaled up and scaled back several times over the decade. The New York Times claims the ultimate reason that it failed was because Apple was simply unable to develop the software and algorithms for a car with autonomous driving.
The cancellation announcement earlier this week reportedly came as a surprise to the approximately 2,000 employees working on the project.
Many of the employees who were working on the car will move to Apple’s artificial intelligence division to work on generative AI under AI chief John Giannandrea.
Unfortunately, there will be layoffs, although some of the hardware engineers and car designers who were on the Apple Car team may be able to move to other divisions and projects in the firm.
Earlier this year, rumors of the Apple Car project being scaled back began to circulate, as Apple abandoned previous plans for a fully autonomous vehicle. The company was said to instead be focusing on an electric vehicle with fewer self-driving features. The target release date was said to be 2026, but now the project has been canceled completely.