For a decade, it was Silicon Valley lore: Apple was building a car — everyone knew it, even though the company went into full "can neither confirm nor deny" mode anytime a reporter asked about it. The top-secret project was known internally as "Project Titan," and it was going to do to the auto industry what the iPhone did to cellphones.
No more.
Apple is pulling the plug on its electric car unit, according to multiple media reports, and transferring many of those employees to its artificial intelligence division, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the decision.
Why it matters
The rise of AI is the most important trend in tech right now, and its development is going to command a stupid amount of money and human talent over the next several years.
At the same time, the furor over electric vehicles is dying down. Carmakers are slashing prices and pulling back on investments.
Apple is following a trend and trying to narrow the gap between itself and rivals like Microsoft and Alphabet, which are leading the Big Tech pack on all things AI.
The car that never was
It's hard to quietly pour billions of dollars into a new venture when you're a publicly traded company as closely watched as Apple. Denying the car project's existence became a real three-raccoons-in-a-trench-coat moment for Tim Cook.
We knew they were hiding a car because:
- Apple had been hiring automotive executives since at least 2014.
- It received a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test self-driving vehicles in 2017.
- It acquired Drive.ai, a self-driving car startup.
- Apple also secured several car-related patents, including one for a virtual reality system to address motion sickness, and another for adjusting the tint on a window in real time.
- Apple (maybe) considered buying Tesla in 2017, according to Elon Musk.
The Apple car was, of course, a terribly expensive face-plant. The timing isn't great, either, because it looks like Apple is panicking about how far behind it is on AI, an industry whose potential future value is practically unquantifiable.
But we shouldn't discount the innovations that came from the project, which created CarPlay, among other things. Since 2014, the ability to link your iPhone to your car has become standard, and that's all thanks to the software Apple developed, the Atlantic's Matteo Wong wrote this week.
"Apple is so big, and its devices so pervasive, that it didn't need to sell a single vehicle in order to transform the automobile industry—not through batteries and engines, but through software," Wong writes. "Virtually every leading car company has taken an Apple-inspired approach to technology, to such a degree that "smartphone on wheels" has become an industry cliché."
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