Apple has reportedly abandoned Project Titan, its electric car project after nearly ten years with a team of nearly 2,000 employees to its programme which intended to build a fully autonomous electric car.
According to Bloomberg, Project Titan, faced fierce competition in the electric vehicle (EV) sector since its launch in 2014.
Apple had to write off billions of dollars in the project and also saw a departure of multiple executives citing lack of leadership support. The demand for EVs has also been slowing down even automakers Cruise and Google-owned Waymo have also struggled to expand their products beyond San Francisco.
Bloomberg reports that Apple may transfer employees its shuttered car division to Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects to join other big tech firms working on Generative AI projects after the popularity of ChatGPT, from the Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
Google has Gemini while Twitter/X has Grok and several other big tech firms are working on text, image, sound AI platforms for the next generation of consumers. Meta, Amazon, Alibaba and Baidu are all working on their AI platforms to be used among their products.
In 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook saw autonomous cars as “the mother of all AI projects,” and it’s $100,000 worth vehicle without pedals or a steering wheel was part of that future. The firm later scaled back its plans to a less autonomous driving system for lane centering and adaptive cruise control and not one that can steer itself.