Now, it seems Apple has pulled the plug this week on its stop-start, stop-start automotive venture, as Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports. Codenamed “Project Titan,” Apple’s secretive car project has hit the end of the road and may go down as a classic case of one of those ‘what ifs’ and a rare mishit from the spaceship campus in Cupertino.
Apple never openly admitted that it is working on a car, though there were hints galore. “We investigate so many things internally. Many of them never see the light of day. I’m not saying that one will not,” Cook said in a 2021 interview when quizzed about Apple’s car plans.
“The autonomy itself is a core technology, in my view. If you sort of step back, the car, in a lot of ways, is a robot. An autonomous car is a robot. And so there’s lots of things you can do with autonomy. And we’ll see what Apple does,” Cook said. That is perhaps the closest you can get Apple to confirm — or deny — that it was indeed working on an electric car plan.
While Apple executives may have once harboured visions of revolutionising personal transportation, the writing had long been on the wall for Project Titan’s termination, according to insider sources interviewed by Bloomberg.
A money pit from the start
Reported to have begun a decade ago in 2014, Project Titan reportedly blew through billions of dollars as Apple embarked on pie-in-the-sky plans to create an electric vehicle powered by self-driving software and breakthrough battery technology, according to sources cited in Bloomberg’s report. A report by The New York Times suggests that in the last five years, Apple has spent $113 billion on research and development. So it is anyone’s guess how much was earmarked for the electric car, but you can be sure that it would have many zeroes at the end.
Apple went on a hiring spree as well. So much so that it prompted Elon Musk to comment on it as well. “They have hired people we’ve fired. We always jokingly call Apple the ‘Tesla Graveyard’. If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I’m not kidding,” Musk told a German news outlet in 2015. That’s pretty much around the same time Apple’s electric car rumours began to swirl and gather momentum.
Hundreds of engineers were supposedly working at developing custom components across the entire vehicle stack in a skunkworks-style operation cloaked in secrecy, noted the Bloomberg report. Early prototypes rumoredly built by magnesium-specialist subsidiary Mesa Rim hint at irresistible “iPhone on wheels” dreams reportedly starting to crystallise within Apple’s design labs at the time.
Year after year, rosy forecasts seemingly promised Apple was rounding the corner toward launching its first vehicle. But a steady talent bleed from the project hinted that all was not well with the plan, suggests the Bloomberg report.
High-profile names attached to Titan during its early days had already abandoned the ship even before this month’s news. Critical players departing in recent years included Project Titan heads Doug Field, Bob Mansfield, and Steve Zadesky, along with countless other directors and VPs representing decades of combined automotive expertise.
The road less travelled
So what went wrong? That’s anyone’s guess, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has some ideas, and he does have a record of getting it right when it comes to Apple.
Project Titan has long been reported to have perpetually failed to capitalise on flying starts, according to longtime Apple employees as quoted in the report. Field’s appointment in 2018 marked the third major reboot, with his fresh mandate to have a passenger vehicle ready by 2023.
Impressed by Tesla’s success, Field put Apple’s custom technologies aside to refocus the project around integrated software and commercialising self-driving car hardware. But despite the said public testing that followed in California and Arizona, developmental hurdles proved too daunting on Apple’s compressed new timeline. Rather than push ahead gratefully on the momentum or trim ambitious features to get something into consumers’ hands, the company found itself back at the drawing board.
By late 2021, yet another strategy pivot was reported aimed at reducing Project Titan’s scope closer to market viability. After years stuck in research paralysis, Apple finally acknowledged sweeping self-driving capabilities were out of reach for the foreseeable future and pivoted again; this time, the plan was to build an electric car much like how Teslas are, and if the insiders are to be quoted this would have been ready to hit the roads by 2026. Though, that isn’t happening anymore.
Driving in a new lane
By abandoning Project Titan, Apple swallows hard in reportedly acknowledging over $10 billion spent and countless late nights that ultimately went nowhere. Having a market cap of close to $3 trillion means that Apple can afford a few big bets that never reach consumers. But by moving the remaining Project Titan team to work on AI and augmented reality instead, Apple is making a practical choice.
Apple may have just realised what Musk said in 2021, “Prototypes are easy, volume production is hard, positive cash flow is excruciating.” After all, the man knows better than most people in the world how to make a successful electric car company.
“We love to integrate hardware, software, and services, and find the intersection points of those because we think that’s where the magic occurs. And so that’s what we love to do. And we love to own the primary technology that’s around that,” said Cook in a 2021 interview. The magic hasn’t happened in the car at this time, but who knows as Apple has the hardware, software, and services, so the car that never was might just be on the road someday.