Apple’s car is reportedly dead

Ten years, billions of dollars, multiple management changes and dozens of rumors later, the Apple Car project is dead. A new report from BloombergApple’s Mark Gurman says Apple has officially canceled the car, breaking the news to the nearly 2,000 employees who worked on it on Tuesday.

As part of the change, Apple will move “many employees working on the car” to the company’s artificial intelligence division, where they will focus on generative AI projects, which Apple is expected to share more about later this year, according to a statement by CEO Tim Cook during the company’s earnings call earlier this month. But the automotive team also included hundreds of hardware engineers and automotive designers, some of whom Bloomberg reports, they will be able to apply for jobs in other divisions of the company. The rest will likely be fired.

Apple has never spoken publicly about its efforts to create a vehicle known internally as Project Titan. But a number of leaks over the years revealed the company’s ambitions to expand into a brand new product category in which it had no experience. At the start of the project in 2014, Apple wanted to create a fully self-driving car without pedals or a steering wheel, with a remote command center ready to take over as driver. But in recent years, Apple has scaled back its ambitions. As recently as last month, new reports suggested that Apple’s car, which could debut in 2028, would be an electric vehicle closer to Tesla than something completely new.

Project Titan has also gone through numerous management changes. In 2021, Apple appointed Kevin Lynch, an executive who previously led development of the Apple Watch, to head the automotive division after Doug Field, the previous head of Project Titan, left Ford.

Apple had it is reported thought to price the car at around $100,000, comparable to the high-end Tesla Model X. But Apple executives were reportedly concerned about profit margins at that price point. The move is a rare setback for the company, which according to Bloomberg has been working on “powertrains, self-driving hardware and software, car interiors and exteriors, and other key components” over the years.