Apple has reportedly decided to completely cancel and shelf its bold endeavor to launch an electric vehicle in favor of focusing its efforts on generative AI development, according to a new Bloomberg report.
The company has shelved all plans and engineering work on the now-canceled electric car project, which reportedly has been in development for more than a decade and racked up billions of dollars in research and development. Teams working on “Project Titan” are being disbanded, with many engineers being relocated to work on generative AI features instead.
Apple informed teams working on Project Titan of its intentions today via its Chief Operating Officer Jeff WilliamsJeff Williams is Apple's Chief Operating Officer, making him primarily responsible for the company's worldwide operations and procurement. Born in 1963, Williams holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from North Carolina State University and an MBA from Duke University. Williams has held his current role at Apple since December 2015. Among leading worldwide operations, Williams is also responsible... and Kevin Lynch, who was the last executive to oversee work over the project. The news reportedly came as a shock to over 2,000 employees working on the electric car project, which kicked off a decade ago back in 2014. Apple’s top executives authorized plans to cancel the project earlier this month, the report adds.
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Some engineers within the project will be offered the chance to relocate to the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning group under the leadership of John GiannandreaJohn Giannandrea was born in the 1960s in Bridge of Allan, Scotland. Giannandrea received a Bachelor of Science with Honors in Computer Science from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland in 1988. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the same university in 2013. In addition to his role at Apple, Giannandrea is a board of trustees member at..., where they will be mainly working on generative AI. However, automotive and mechanical engineers and designers will reportedly be laid off. They will be offered the chance to relocate to other hardware engineering groups within Apple, but layoffs seem inevitable at this point.
An earlier Bloomberg report detailed ongoing problems within the project. The most recent one was the downgrade from pursuing a Level 4 autonomous capability to a more crude Level 2+ which is closer to what other automakers including Tesla are currently achieving with their vehicles. Senior Apple executives were also concerned about the amount of revenue margin the company could’ve generated from its electric vehicle, which was targeted to be priced at around $100,000.
The report also detailed some pressure from Apple’s board of directors on CEO Tim Cook and other senior executives to figure out a new direction for the project, which suffered multiple delays and internal rounds of layoffs before today’s complete cancelation. The apparent lack of progress within the project and ballooning costs were a real concern for Apple’s board, which may have ultimately forced the company’s top brass to shelf the project for good.
