Tech giant Apple has reportedly canceled a decade-long plan to break into the electric vehicle market despite spending several billion dollars on the project. The scrapped effort, codenamed “Project Titan,” was intended to help Apple compete with Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors, but quickly became little more than an expensive pipe dream for the company.
Apple announced the end of “Project Titan” internally on Tuesday, surprising the roughly 2,000 employees actively at work in the secretive Special Projects Group. According to Bloomberg, many of the staffers will be switched over to Apple’s generative AI division or help to develop new versions of the Apple Vision Pro virtual reality headsets.
“Apple canceling this project is a sigh of relief for us,” said Dan Morgan, senior portfolio manager for Apple shareholder Synovus Trust. “When you looked at Apple’s future initiatives, the car project was always the most far-fetched for Apple. This just isn’t in their wheelhouse.”
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Rumors of the project first emerged in early 2015, and Apple CEO Tim Cook officially confirmed that the iPhone maker was interested in competing with other big names in the EV industry. Cook described the effort as “the mother of all AI projects… probably one of the most difficult AI projects.”
According to company insiders familiar with the project, Apple’s primary focus was on developing new battery technology that would make electric vehicles faster and cheaper to manufacture, as well as software that would make their cars fully self-driving.
However, last month, the company announced that the timetable for the EV’s debut had been pushed back from 2026 to 2028 amid larger challenges in the industry. As Valuetainment previously reported, Mercedez-Benz announced last week that it had shelved its plan to go all-electric by 2030 due to low consumer demand.
Related: Mercedes-Benz Joins Other Automakers in Cancelling “EV Only By 2030” Plans
At the same time, the Biden administration has also revised its stance on widespread use of electric vehicles, easing off its goal of “limiting tailpipe emissions” and forcing a nationwide transition to EVs within a decade.
Connor Walcott is a staff writer for Valuetainment.com. Follow Connor on X and look for him on VT’s “The Unusual Suspects.”
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