There's bad news for Apple fans waiting for a car from their favourite brand. Apple has cancelled the
Apple Car
project. The iPhone maker's plan to take on Tesla with its self-driving car is officially off the table. The secret project called Project Titan is widely said to be in the works for nearly a decade. Apple is reported to be building an artificial intelligence system that was powerful and energy-efficient enough to make a car fully autonomous.
Incidentally, the
Apple Car project
was never public, and so is the announcement of its scrapping. The news that Apple is ending its car project was first reported by Bloomberg.
How the ‘2000-member team’ was informed
Apple reportedly told 2,000 employees in an internal meeting on Tuesday, February 27. The company informed the employees that it had scrapped the project and that members of the group would be shifted to different roles, including in Apple’s artificial intelligence division. The decision is said to have followed months of frenzied meetings between top executives and the company’s board over how to proceed. Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and project head Kevin Lynch broke the news to the team during a meeting that lasted less than 15 minutes.
First-ever high-profile cancellation
The cancellation of the Apple Car project is widely seen as a rare move by Apple, which typically doesn’t shelve such public and high-profile projects. It is more so as the company reportedly had been testing the car in the US. Apple CEO Tim Cook too had publicly hinted that Apple was interested in entering the car space. The company even went for some high-profile hiring from auto giants like Ford and others for the project. .
What the cancellation of the Apple Car project means
The cancellation of the Apple Car project means that Apple, which so far has held back from any big moves in AI, will focus more energies on the technology that has almost taken the world by storm, ever since Microsoft-owned ChatGPT went mainstream early 2023. Apple's efforts in AI so far have been in stark contrast to that of rivals Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft, which have first-mover advantage in incorporating the technology.
What happens to the team working on the Apple Car project
The cancelling of the project means that the 2000 odd employees working on the autonomous car project will need to seek opportunities within the company. Those who are not able to find anything will have to go. According to a report in Bloomberg, there are three main groups within SPG — a software team based in Ottawa under executive Dan Dodge; a cloud engineering and software group under Libo Meyers; and a software project management team under Vera Carr — will be shifted to Craig Federighi’s software department to work on Apple’s main operating systems.
Apple’s artificial intelligence team for the car, which had been reporting to Stuart Bowers, will reportedly be shifted to work on generative AI in John Giannandrea’s machine learning division. A part of the team may even join the Apple Vision Pro team.
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