Apple Spent More Than $10 Billion on Apple Car Before Canceling Project

Apple spent greater than $10 billion engaged on the Apple Car over the past decade, based on a report from The New York Times that particulars the problems the challenge confronted throughout growth. Apple first launched the challenge in 2014 and let it flounder for greater than a decade earlier than calling it off earlier this week.

Cash was spent on analysis and growth, together with the 1000’s of Apple engineers and automotive consultants that labored on the challenge. Some staff inside Apple are stated to have suspected that the endeavor was prone to fail from the start, and so they referred to the automotive as “the Titanic catastrophe” as a substitute of its “Venture Titan” codename.

Apple CEO Tim Cook signed off on the challenge, however members of the automotive group knew that it was going to be near unattainable. An electrical car with self-driving capabilities would want to price at the least $100,000, and it might have razor skinny margins and stiff competitors.

Whereas Apple reportedly held discussions with Elon Musk a couple of attainable buy of Tesla, the corporate determined that constructing its personal automotive made extra sense than making an attempt to combine Tesla into Apple. Way back in 2014, Musk stated that he had “conversations” with Apple, however he stated on the time that an acquisition appeared “most unlikely.”

Apple was by no means capable of finding the appropriate chief for the ‌Apple Automobile‌ challenge. As we detailed in a look back at the Apple Car’s history earlier today, the challenge had 4 totally different leads and was scaled up and scaled again a number of occasions over the course of the final 10 years. Based on The New York Occasions, the final word purpose that it failed was as a result of Apple was merely unable to develop the software program and algorithms for a automotive with autonomous driving.

The greater than 2,000 staff that labored on the automotive challenge are being redistributed, some will be part of different groups at Apple to work on AI and different applied sciences, and a few will likely be laid off. Apple will take what it discovered from the automotive challenge and apply it to different gadgets like AI-powered AirPods with cameras, robotic assistants, and augmented actuality.

Extra on the downfall of the ‌Apple Automobile‌ and among the applied sciences that Apple got here up with could be discovered within the full The New York Times report.