The Apple Car Is Dead, For Real This Time

The tale of Apple’s plans to build a car has been steadily bubbling away on and off in both motoring and tech publications for nearly a decade now, with stories of the project being cancelled and revived in the past.

Now, though, it looks as if the Californian tech giant has killed its car for good. Reports suggest that the company communicated this to its employees earlier this week.

Despite the first rumblings of the project happening all the way back in 2015, we’ve never known a huge amount about what was internally called ‘Project Titan.’ We knew it would probably have been a full battery-electric vehicle, and include some level of autonomy, although that was gradually scaled back over time as it’s become apparent that the regulations, tech and demand for vehicles with fully autonomous capabilities are a lot further away than Apple originally envisioned.

At one point, Hyundai claimed it was in talks with Apple to collaborate on development, but quickly backtracked on this, and that’s about the bulk of what we know about the now-cancelled project. We don’t have any idea of what the car would have looked like, or how far along in development it was. Safe to say it probably would have CarPlay as standard, though.

The project itself has met with multiple delays, too: originally, the car was slated for a 2019 launch, but by the time we last heard anything earlier this year, that date had moved back to 2028. Now, it seems Apple has seen the writing on the wall, and has reportedly moved the majority of the apparently 2000-strong team of employees that were working on the car over to artificial intelligence projects.

It’s a fairly unremarkable end to a long-running story, but this isn’t the first time a tech company has abandoned plans to build a car: Dyson did the same a few years ago, while Google’s autonomous tech offshoot, Waymo, is now focusing on converting existing cars. It remains to be seen if Sony can pull it off with its Afeela brand, a joint venture with Honda that it seems to be making a proper go of.

Main image: Jorge Láscar from Australia, CC BY 2.0