[RahulNagaraj]

According to media reports, tech giant Apple, has cancelled its decade-long efforts to develop an electric car.

Reports state that the company's COO Jeff Williams & Kevin Lynch, VP of the project, disclosed the news internally, surprising the 2000 employees working on the project. The project is said to begin winding down soon, with the employees of the car team being shifted to Apple's Artificial Intelligence division under the leadership of John Giannandrea.



As per reports, employees like hardware engineers and vehicle designers could apply for jobs on other Apple teams. However, reports do suggest layoffs will happen, although the exact number is unclear.

The Cupertino-based tech giant started working on 'Project Titan' back in 2014. The EV was initially expected to come with fully autonomous driving capabilities while featuring limousine-like interiors and tech. Prior to the decision to cancel, the latest shared internally was that the car's release date was delayed to 2028 and about reducing the vehicle's self-driving specification from Level 4 to Level 2. The Apple EV was expected to be priced around the $100,000 mark.

Source: Bloomberg

Link to Team-BHP news

[Gaur]

Not too surprising but would be interesting to see what did they achieve in 10 years.

[superblover]

When you are one of the most valuable companies on the planet, you get to do exploratory initiatives like this. But the scale of it and the amount of money pumped in, all to vanish in a puff of smoke like this feels like a massive fail. I wonder how they will explain it to their investors and stakeholders.

[SmartCat]

Whenever Apple enters a new consumer space, the final product released into the market usually has premium pricing, best-in-class specifications and features. Eg: earphone, watch, VR headset etc.

But there is one company already doing that in the EV space for a couple of decades now.

It probably took 10 years for Apple to figure out that their product will never be significantly different from others in the market.

[GTO]

Originally Posted by Gaur

Not too surprising but would be interesting to see what did they achieve in 10 years.

Companies with a lot of cash frequently "experiment" and see what sticks on the wall. Most projects lose money, 1 out of 25 makes a billion dollars a year.

I had called bullshit on the Apple Car project years ago, on multiple threads.

Originally Posted by GTO

In my personal opinion, there is less than 1% chance of Apple entering an extremely capital-intensive market with slim product margins, which also takes up an enormous amount of management bandwidth. From the USA, Tesla is the first car company to have seen success after....Ford, GM & Chrysler!

I'm not buying this rumour at all.

Originally Posted by GTO

Still, even if the news is true, Apple will not be building cars & selling them the conventional way. The auto business is way too capital intensive, complex and has slim profit margins...not really something that Apple (or its shareholders) would be keen on.

Let's see. Maybe Apple will sell its technology to other car makers? Or they will target an extremely profitable niche?

Originally Posted by GTO

As much as Apple fanboys must be salivating at the thought of an iCar, I don't think it's a real possibility.

At best, it could be just a fun internal project. Here's why I think so:

- There's a BIG difference between engineering a car vis a vis software design & gadgets.

- Apple has ZERO experience in engineering a car with so many mechanical parts. It's one thing to design an iPhone, entirely another to develop a car with thousands of parts. When it comes to automobiles, Apple is as much of a newbie as anyone else.

- No real manufacturing base in place. You can't order 100% of the parts from China and have a simple assembly plant. Manufacturing a car requires a full-fledged factory.

- Doesn't make any business sense. When Apple can make more profits than car manufacturers by selling iPhones, iPads, Computers & Music, why would they want to enter a complex capital-intensive industry?

- Distribution: You can't sell a car via tie-ups with operators (Airtel, AT&T). You need your own distribution network.

- Scalability: The market for expensive electric cars is tiny. And you can't survive by depending a 100% on the USA market.

- Doubts over whether an electric car is 'the next big thing'. The days of the internal combustion engine might be numbered, but there could just be a disruptive technology coming up (e.g. hydrogen fuel-cell cars).

- Challenges of after-sales service, meeting innumerable rules & legislations, charging stations etc.

End of the day, we've seen no real successful innovation from Apple since the iPhone. A full-fledged automobile will be too much of a distraction from their core business.

[Love4Cars]

While Apple is a very premium brand, it relies heavily on contract manufacturing, which I doubt anyone in the car business can afford as an OEM. They can design a beautiful EV, add amazing User Experience around it, but they won't be able to price it well in a competitive industry with their manufacturing strategy.
Also, the barriers to entry are higher in Auto industry but the ability to differentiate is pretty low as a business. For Apple's high margin business, the stakeholders wouldn't be happy going into a low margin business.

[Venkatesh.C]

Originally Posted by superblover

I wonder how they will explain it to their investors and stakeholders.

The car may be dead, but we can be sure that the tech 'invented' by this division will find its way to other Apple devices/services or even become a service of its own!

[antony5279]

Thank god they realised electric is not the way forward.

There were quite a few memes on the way the car would be charged. Imagine an Apple mouse

[cooldip]

An interesting take by WIRED.

I was hardly expecting the car to be a reality. It always sounded very much like the rumored Apple Television from about a decade ago (not the current hockey puck box) - big, bulky, and difficult to service.

The most important development out of all this is the expansion of the scope of Carplay although we are yet to see real-world examples.

My prediction (not that I'm a visionary in tech or auto) is that car companies will resist but then give up a lot of the human machine interaction to Carplay. It would be tough to beat Apple at designing human interfaces. And this is Apple's niche. Very high quality integrated software that can be sold at a premium.

It keeps Apple's users in the walled Apple garden, relieves the car companies of the headache of managing large software teams - software and auto are very different businesses, and still helps the car companies keep the premium pricing for a luxury software interface.

[Rocketscience]

I won't call myself an Apple fan but I do own a lot of their products in my household but will jump ship in an instant if someone does it better than them in any of those categories, lately though they have been majorly slipping and I feel they might be on the decline overall as a company and the senior executives and perhaps the CEO is to be blamed for lack of clear ambition, drive and command -

1- They started and invested billions and then moved out or the car project, hell Mi made it happen, even Sony is trying its luck, none of them have the kind of resources and mad assets that Apple does.

2- The mobile phone modem - Apple picked up a fight with the market leader Qualcomm because of their usual high headed attitude but just failed miserably in developing a working competitor to them, they are trying for more than 3 years and have just been postponing it year after year, we are not talking about a startup here but a major tech giant!

3- The mobile chipset - if we talk about just 4 years ago till about recently, they were atleast 2-3 years ahead of their competitors and the latest most expensive Android phone chipset could not touch their 2 year old flagship in benchmark (objective), leave alone the overall user experience (subjective), well a couple of years later and today post the exit of some real key engineers, no guesses due to their usual attitude problem and the lead has shrunk to its lowest in years, the CPU is hardly 20% ahead and the GPU has been overtook by Android competition since last year!
Even the overall user experience has stagnated like anything, I upgraded from iPhone 11 to iPhone 15 a couple months ago and in these 4 generations of phones I'd say the overall upgrade is hardly to the tune of 10%, the 11 used to be just as fast as this is when it was new and despite the software updates which slowed it down over the years, it is still hardly 15-20% slower than this today!

The battery life too is exactly the same, if not worse than what 11's was when it was new. The only upgrade I feel is the OLED display (10% advantage during pitch dark usage because of OLED's black black and slightly higher resolution screen), 5-10% better camera with a usable 2x mode and this is about it.

4- The less I say about Apple's VR headset the better, it would never have been approved to ship had a better CEO been in charge of Apple, I mean come on, we need to carry an external battery! Is this the 1980s! Then despite paying an exorbitant sum of money, something which straightaway puts it in an extremely niche space from where it will likely never get out of (Remember the iPhone, iPad, even Apple watch and Airpods were all priced at an premium but were never unattainable or extremely unreasonable) , here we get a half baked gadget which is pretty unusable as a computer/laptop replacement, or a mobile phone replacement, the only thing it is good at is watching movies/TV shows, but with that kind of money you can build yourself a decent home theater which your family can enjoy as well, also with its 2 hours battery life, how many movies can you enjoy on the go is questionable. This is just not how Apple used to operate! This thing is simply an unfinished beta product that should never have been released!

The current CEO got lucky to take over in an extremely favourable position and is flying the company on autopilot ever since, well these are turbulent times and a skilful manual intervention is required if they really want to continue flying as high as they have so far!

[sidoza]

Some of the best, long-lasting, and performant products that I own, are made by Apple. Their expertise and caliber are well-known and well-documented. For my phone, watch, earbuds, and laptop, I don't even know a decent alternative, and that says it all.

They are masters in battery, camera, design, and software. These are reasons enough to look at a car, as a modern electric car is predominately made of this. From what I can guess, they like to work in fields where they own the core technologies and would have sensed something crucial isn't in their hands.

The Apple Car project may be dead, but it's not a good idea to assume they didn't know what to do or how to do it. They demonstrate this with every product release, hardware, or software.

I am sure the learnings from this project will seep through into other products. Also remember, all of this has been "he overheard, she overheard" reporting (Mark Gurman, Kuo et al.). There is no official statement on this.

And remember, when there is cutthroat competition with wafer-thin margins in a competitive market, that's usually a leading indicator that a differentiated product will be lapped up by the customers.

[Iamnoisebomb]

I feel this was a smart move. Being a great company is not about getting into the hype. It's about how they provide products useful and affordable for the masses. They might have realized that there won't be many customers for their premium pricing or they might have foreseen the future and potential long-term reliability issues of EV's. Maybe it's because of my likeness to combustion engines(No harm meant to EV lovers) or maybe Apple realized that they're not built for this.

[NiInJa]

Originally Posted by sidoza

Some of the best, long-lasting, and performant products that I own, are made by Apple. Their expertise and caliber are well-known and well-documented. For my phone, watch, earbuds, and laptop, I don't even know a decent alternative, and that says it all.

They are masters in battery, camera, design, and software. These are reasons enough to look at a car, as a modern electric car is predominately made of this. From what I can guess, they like to work in fields where they own the core technologies and would have sensed something crucial isn't in their hands.

To each his own, but there are counter-arguments for each claim made above And discussing that will take the thread off topic. My opinion: They are exceedingly good at certain things, but not 'masters'. There are decent alternatives for laptops, phones and audio devices. Watch is one device which has no alternative at this point.

As GTO and others mentioned, building an electric car ground up would require lot of cash and then selling it well is a different story altogether.

Apple, with all their might, can come up with technologies that augment next generation of electric mobility very well, but the problem must have been the massive hardware side, to build a vehicle that will work specifically with their software, then sell it too, with a profit. No wonder, their Stocks went up soon after they made this announcement!

[HereticHermit]

Considering the dearth of information and regular updates, what happened was inevitable and just a matter of time but in the process they must have created sizable IP and IP use licensing at right time to right vendors mean, money. So it may not mean all doom and gloom for Apple.
Blackberry is dead for aam janta but fact is they have the biggest IP inventory in World of mobile technology and telephony and put it to good use and survived the crash.

[blogslogger]

This is classic Apple. Apple has never been an innovator. It mastered the 'wait and watch' game. Like Ayrton Senna, it watches what the competiton is doing and then brings out a blazing product. I am pretty sure the giant doughnut office has a poster somewhere 'Let others do the beta testing' :P

Similarly EV's are seeing a cooling off in demand- macroeconomics, car makers pivoting to hybrids and alternate fuels in medium run and governments delaying electrification goals.
Tim Apple perfectly judged that the EV revolution is a few years away and decided to cancel the product.