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The car, on which Apple has spent billions of dollars in research, had been designed as a rival to Tesla’s electric vehicles, which come with self-driving features.
By Brian X. Chen
Reporting from San Francisco
Apple has canceled its plans to release an electric car with self-driving abilities, a secretive product that had been in the works for nearly a decade.
The company told workers at an internal meeting on Tuesday that it had scrapped the task and that members of the organization would be transferred to other roles, adding Apple’s synthetic intelligence division, according to a user briefed on the discussion, who requested anonymity because of the announcement not public.
As part of the restructuring, Kevin Lynch, an executive involved in the auto project, will report to John Giannandrea, the company’s head of synthetic intelligence strategy, the source said.
Apple declined to comment. The news that Apple is ending its car project was previously reported via Bloomberg.
Though Apple had not unveiled its car to consumers, the product had for many years been one of Silicon Valley’s worst-kept secrets because it was being tested on public roads. The cancellation is a rare move by Apple, which typically doesn’t shelve such public and high-profile projects.
The company has struggled in recent years to find new avenues for growth, as its pivotal iPhone has saturated the market and people are upgrading their phones less than before.
Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has publicly hinted that Apple is interested in getting into the automotive business. The company has also been publicly testing numerous vehicles equipped with self-driving technology for decades. The car, internally dubbed Titan and Project 172, was a tricky product to develop, as parts of the department were shut down, plans were scrapped and restarted, and dozens of employees were laid off along the way.
The car, which Apple spent billions of dollars researching, had been intended as a rival to Tesla’s electric vehicles, which include autonomous driving features.
The product was important for Mr. Cook’s legacy as it would have countered the perception that Apple had lost its ability to innovate and come up with the next big thing. Under Mr. Cook’s leadership, the company has introduced a small number of new hardware products, including the Apple Watch, which now leads the smart watch market; the HomePod smart speaker, which flopped; and the Vision Pro, the $3,500 goggles that it released this month to rival Meta’s virtual reality headsets.
The company has invested heavily on developing new technologies. In the last five years, it spent $113 billion on research and development.
Brian X. Chen is the senior editor of customer generation at The Times. Check out and write Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the generation we use. Learn more about Brian X. Chen
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