For the approximately 2,000 employees working for nearly a decade on the ‘Apple Car,’ the news came as a bombshell on Tuesday: the billion-dollar project will be shuttered, and people will be relocated to other projects like AI, if possible. The message was delivered to the team internally by Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, Jeff Williams, and Kevin Lynch, the man in charge of the project.

Apple has been working since 2014 on what was called Project Titan to develop its own car, which was intended to be electric and would drive fully autonomously (SAE Level 4). However, according to the Bloomberg agency that broke the news, the project reached a make-or-break point a month ago, and under the pressure of the Board, Apple now pulled the plug.

Most software engineers will be able to shift to other teams like artificial intelligence (AI) development within Apple under John Giannandrea. Most of the work done on autonomous cars relates to AI and will be helpful in several sectors.

Hundreds of automotive specialists

But Apple hired hundreds of ‘hardware specialists’ and car designers over the decade. Some can apply for jobs elsewhere within Apple, which employs over 161,000 people worldwide. But there will be inevitable layoffs, too.

As Apple lured away many of them from the traditional car industry, we’ll probably see them picked up by the competition like Google’s autonomous daughter Waymo or giants like Amazon that might have ambitions for their own cars. What Apple is planning to do with the legacy of its Titan Project is unclear. As always, Apple declined to comment.

Obscured by clouds

The Apple Car project was always ‘obscured by clouds’, and the team working on it, internally called Special Projects Group (SPG), changed several times, but actual news about their progress never leaked.

Apple has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars yearly on the Titan project. Under pressure from the Board, a new strategy to ‘downgrade’ the ambitions was adopted after a series of ‘hefty’ meetings with project leader Kevin Lynch and Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook.

The latest rumors were that Apple targeted a car with a luxurious interior at $100,000 but with a less ambitious Level 2+ autonomy, meaning advanced driving assist systems (ADAS) like Tesla or most premium EVs today.

Evolving to Level 3

Tesla’s Autopilot is evolving with Full Self-Driving (FSD) to Level 3, where cars can make informed decisions, such as overtaking autonomously. German carmaker Mercedes-Benz was the first to get official approval for SAE Level 3 autonomous driving in the US.

But only on highways up to 40 mph (60 km/h). It allows drivers to take their eyes and minds off the traffic and focus on secondary activities, such as communicating with colleagues via the In-Car Office, surfing the internet, or relaxing while watching a film.

Musk waving goodbye

On its own X microblogging site, Elon Musk greeted Apple’s decision not entirely without malicious joy with a ‘goodbye’ emoji. In 2021, Apple hired Tesla’s former AutoPilot software director, Christopher ‘CJ’ Moore. But there had been a lot of back-and-forth personnel moves before.

Moore started to work under Stuart Bowers, another Tesla executive who served as vice president of engineering and worked on the AutoPilot, who joined Apple the year before. Two other former Tesla execs, the chief of drive trains, Michael Schwekutsch, and the head of interiors, Steve MacManus, already joined Apple earlier.

Never a prototype

Although the Apple team worked for years on power trains, interior and exterior design, and its own software environment, it never came to a prototype. That was one of the reasons why Doug Field left in 2021 for Ford, as he didn’t believe top management would ever approve the release. He earned the title of chief advanced technology and embedded systems officer there.

Doug Field was Apple’s VP for its Mac computers’ engineering when he left the company for the first time to join Tesla, where he stayed for five years until 2018 as Senior Vice-President Engineering. Field returned to Apple, took over the Titan Project, and fired 190 team members to restructure it. But that didn’t last either.