Apple Cancels the Apple Car Project

Apple has canceled their ambitious decade-long car project, codenamed Project Titan, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Development on the Apple Car, which was apparently intended to be an electric vehicle with self-driving capabilities, became news in 2015, and originally had a speculative release dates of 2019 and 2020, which obviously came and went without anything rolling off the lot. Later news continued to push the project further out, with an increasingly diminished scope.

Developing a car is a significant undertaking with myriad engineering challenges, regulatory obstacles, and immense competition from long established automobile brands.

It’s unclear why exactly Apple gave up the project, but reports from Bloomberg and New York Times suggest that Apple was unable to create the self-driving functionality they desired.

The New York Times report even mentioned that Apple wanted the car to have no steering wheel, and instead be controlled by Siri, which, if you’ve ever used Siri, you probably have some opinions on. (“Hey Siri, turn right!” … ‘Searching the web for “morning flight”‘ “No no no Siri I’m going to be late for work, take me to work!” … ‘OK, playing Men At Work on Apple Music’ … [human dives out the moving vehicle]..).

The cancellation of Project Titan, which apparently some Apple employees referred to as a “Titanic disaster”, has significant implications for the tech industry as a whole, as well as the future of electric cars and vehicles in general. The potential entry of Apple into the automobile market would have been incredibly disruptive, and exciting, given Apple’s obsessive approach to design and user experience.

Apple is said to be redirecting many of the 2000+ employees from the Apple Car project to other areas of focus within Apple, including to teams working on generative AI. Generative AI tools and Large Language Models, like ChatGPT, are developing rapidly and being incorporated in everything from web browsers, to search engines, and various software applications. In fact, the whacky conceptual car image at the top of this article was created with the Dall-E generative AI feature incorporated into Bing simply by prompting it to create an image of an Apple Car. There are rumors that generative AI will play a significant part in iOS 18, along with a revamped Siri.

If you’re an Apple enthusiast, it’s hard to not be disappointed by the culling of the Apple Car project, and I tend to agree with CultOfMac who referred to the ending of the project as “depressing and sad“. One of my favorite things about Apple is their collective imagination and willingness to try new things that are different – recall that phones before the iPhone were mostly dumb flip phones or had chunky physical keyboards and small screens, and now basically every phone mimics the iPhone appearance and functionality – and while there are plenty of ‘cool’ cars out there today, it would have been undeniably captivating to see what Apple brought to the table.

It’s important to remember that Apple has canceled and shelved other product categories in the past, only to revisit them years later, when technology has evolved enough to achieve what they imagined. So while the Apple Car project may be dead for now, that doesn’t mean it’s dead forever.