Apple has canceled its plans to produce its own electric car — why that’s a good thing
Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, posting on X:
“Apple cancels the Apple Car project after a decade-long, multi-billion effort to rival Tesla. Some employees shifting to Generative AI teams.”
And:
“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 is laying off some working on car hardware. Others moving to AI division.”
Though Apple has never publicly confirmed that it was working on a project to build an Apple-branded self-driving electric car, it’s been an open secret for a decade. We know this through leaks, talks between Apple and auto manufacturers, personnel that have either been hired by Apple from other car companies, or who have left Apple to work for established car companies, and even pictures of vehicles testing Apple’s autonomous driving tech.
Probably the closest thing to a public acknowledgement came in 2017, as recounted by Bloomberg:
“We’re focusing on autonomous systems,” Cook said in a June 5 interview on Bloomberg Television that amounted to his most detailed comments yet on Apple’s automotive plans. “It’s a core technology that we view as very important.” He likened the effort to “the mother of all AI projects,” saying it’s “probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on.”
Reportedly, Apple referred to this project internally as “Project Titan.” Here’s what I had to say about Apple’s automotive efforts in 2020 when I wrote a column during my stint managing Apple coverage for Digg:
“My concern over the years since Project Titan first came to light is that the auto industry is well outside of Apple’s traditional areas of expertise and could be a distraction for Apple, diverting leadership, talent, and money away from Apple’s core products toward something that could wind up going nowhere. (No pun intended.) Still, given Apple’s success over its four plus decades, I wouldn’t put it past Apple to actually deliver a compelling car product.”
I think that sentiment holds up pretty well, and I’m happy that Apple is giving up on its electric car ambitions for a couple of reasons:
First, as I feared four years ago, Project Titan was a drain on Apple’s resources and attention. Apple has a lot of money, but not an infinite amount. And what’s even more precious than money for a company like Apple is time, talent, and focus. All three of those could have been more productively employed by Apple over the last decade if it hadn’t been trying to make an electric car happen.
My second positive takeaway from this is that it’s actually encouraging that Apple has the internal wisdom to walk away from a project of that scale. They could have stubbornly pressed on, not wanting to acknowledge that they can’t deliver a product in this category that meets their own criteria for success. But they didn’t. That’s good leadership, even if it does mean they’ve failed in a sense.
It’s not surprising that they’re shifting many of their engineers into work on generative AI. As Cook said way back in 2017, they saw their self-driving car efforts as “the mother of all AI projects,” so they’ve clearly invested heavily in AI talent over the last decade. And with generative AI being the big thing in tech right now, it’s not surprising that they’ll have plenty of non-car work for those engineers.
I plan to write more about Apple’s AI efforts in the future, but Apple should be making some big announcements about generative AI this summer at their developers conference, WWDC.