Apple Car Project Cost More Than $10 Billion Before Being Cancelled

Apple reportedly spent more than $10 billion on Project Titan, its ambitious decade-long foray to build a fully autonomous self-driving car, which it nixed earlier this week. The project was first launched in 2014 but had floundered for years in the lead-up to its cancellation, with Apple changing goalposts and many leaders leaving the project.

Thousands of Apple engineers and car experts worked on the project. Some employees within Apple reportedly believed the project was doomed to fail from the get-go and referred to it as the titanic disaster instead of Project Titan.

While Apple CEO Tim Cook signed off the project, many members of the team knew that it was going to be close to impossible, says a report. It was believed that to create a self-driving electric car, it would have to cost at least $100,000 and still, it would have thin margins, something against Apple’s values. It would also have very strong incumbent competition.

An NYT report claims that Apple even held discussions with Elon Musk to acquire Tesla, but decided against integrating external technology into its products. Musk also has claimed that conversations happened, but at the time, an acquisition seemed very unlikely.

The challenge was that Apple never had a good leader for the project. It lost Doug Fields to Ford, who had joined Apple from Tesla in 2021. It overall had 4 different leads in its 10-year history, and the project was scaled back multiple times. NYT also claims that Apple had failed to develop the software algorithm for a car with autonomous driving.

At one point, the project had more than 5,000 people, but even most recently, it had more than 2,000 people. Many of these employees are now being redistributed towards Apple’s AI team led by John Giannandrea, its SVP of AI and machine learning strategy, having joined in 2018 from Google where he was the head of search.

Apple is looking to absorb the learnings and the technologies it has developed for its existing products like AI-powered AirPods, cameras, robot assistants, and augmented reality, a space it recently entered with the Apple Vision Pro. That being said, many people will still be laid off from the project who cannot be integrated into other parts of Apple; this would be true for engineers who joined from the auto industry.