The end of the iCar – Apple scraps its autonomous electric vehicle plans after a decade of work
- Apple announced to some employees on Tuesday that it would cancel the ‘Apple Car’
Apple informed employees on Tuesday that it is killing the “Apple Car,” a long-awaited project that has been in the pipeline for more than a decade.
The move to halt the electric car plan was revealed in an internal memo distributed to about 2,000 company employees. Bloomberg reports this.
It said some staff from the team that developed the car, known as the Special Projects Group, will be transferred to the artificial intelligence (AI) department.
However, not everyone would be saved and some layoffs would be unavoidable, the outlet reported.
The tech giant originally planned to create a fully self-driving vehicle as part of a decade-old project internally dubbed Titan. Pictured: A concept of Apple’s self-driving car
When asked about the project by the New York Times in 2021, Apple CEO Tim Cook, pictured, said: “We’ll see what Apple does. We investigate so many things internally. Many of them never see the light of day’
The cancellation of the project comes as a shock. Last month, Bloomberg itself reported that the company would bring the car to market as early as 2028 and reduce its self-driving capabilities.
The memo came from Apple CEO Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, a vice president in charge of the project, Bloomberg reported.
Apple’s electric car has been in the planning stages since 2014, and rumors about what it would entail have evolved over that time.
While its original plans were to create a fully autonomous vehicle, it recently scaled back its plans. Executives were also reportedly concerned that at the $100,000 target price, profit margins would be dangerously small.