Apple cancels e-vehicle project, possibly retains autopilot
Making cars is an investment-intensive business, so there aren’t really many new startups in this industry that aren’t backed by serious funds. Another option is when an already giant business decides to branch out into car manufacturing. This is the case of Apple and its Project Titan, which was supposed to yield an electric car bearing the famous logo on the hood. Recently, it got canceled.
About 10 years in development
“Project Titan” is actually a nickname coined back in 2015, when the rumors of Apple building an electric vehicle of its own took shape. The tech giant hired several talented and experienced engineers to spearhead various aspects of the project, and it felt like everything was moving as planned. In 2022, however, it became known that the task force manning this effort is quite fluid, meaning people come and go, and there’s a lot of criticism internally about how things are handled.
There’s an interesting side to this otherwise sad story of a failed project: according to Wired, quite recently, Apple capped 45,000 miles of autonomous driving, and an advanced self-driving system has always been one of the assumed unique selling points of this product. On February 5th, 2024, the news was distributed inside the company that many of the 2,000 engineers powering Project Titan will be transferred to the giant’s generative AI outfit, which, when you take the aforementioned point into the picture, makes perfect sense. Thus, we may not see a full-fledged car made by Apple in the near future, but it looks like an autopilot system that’ll be used in third-party vehicles is on its way.
The moral of the story? If you’re as large as Apple, you can afford to pursue an unlikely goal – rumor has it, the top management tallied everything up and failed to see a margin in the venture – for a decade. But even in such conditions, when you do call it a day, use every opportunity to turn crisis into opportunity.
