This is the news. Apple has spent more than $10 billion working on the “Apple Car” over the past decade. according to a New York Times publication that details all the problems the project known as Titan faced during its development. Apple began investing in its autonomous car in 2014 and worked on it until 2024, when, as we mentioned a few days ago, it would have been canceled.
From Cupertino money was spent on R&D, as well as the thousands of engineers and automotive experts who worked on the project. Some Apple employees suspected from the start that the project would fail, calling the car a “Titanic disaster” instead of its code name “Project Titan.”
Tim Cook gave his approval to the project, but the car team members would have always thought this was going to be almost impossible. Indeed, an electric vehicle with autonomous driving capabilities is expected to cost at least $100,000, with Very tight margins and tough competition like Tesla and the Chinese electric car market.
Even if Apple discussed with Elon Musk a possible takeover of Tesla, the company decided that building its own car made more sense than trying to integrate Tesla with Apple. In 2014, Musk confirmed he had “conversations” with Apple, but said at the time that an acquisition seemed “very unlikely.”
After its cancellation, the more than 2,000 employees who were focused on the Apple Car project are being redeployed. Some will join other Apple teams to work on AI and other technologies (most of them), and others will be laid off. However, not all investments were in vain, Apple will take much of what it learned in Project Titan and apply it to other devices such as AI-enabled AirPods, cameras, and, in the future, the Vision Pro.
