Apple decided to pull the plug on the multi-year, multi-billion dollar project to build an Apple Car.
But the true multi-billion dollar question is why?
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Apple began working on the Apple Car, codenamed Project Titan or Project 172, about 10 years ago, and spent billions in R&D.
It even filed trademarks and patents for the car, which is how we know the car would have been fully autonomous and, of course, it would have used iOS.
The patents it filed also gave us an idea of what the interior of the Apple car would have been like.
It would have included extensive AR and VR technology, a plethora of displays, and even ‘adjustable tinting windows’.
So we know who’d build the software, but what about the actual car?
This leads us on to what is probably one of the reasons the projects failed.
Building a car from scratch is costly and difficult, even more so for a company that’s never done it before, which is why, at different points, Hyundai, BMW, Daimler and Kia have all been linked to the project.
But this is Apple, and it’s hard to imagine a project paid for by Apple run by somebody else.
Rumors about Apple’s intention to build a car first surfaced in 2014 and, through the years, Apple hired thousands of engineers and invested billions of dollars on this project.
This is the second issue at hand, because Apple knew it was still light-years away from a feasible product even though it’d already spent so much.
This is especially true in the car world, which is heavily regulated, with frequent and sometimes frantic updates that cost automakers billions.
Apple probably had a ‘just-not-gonna-work’ moment and decided to cancel the Apple Car to cut its losses, before spending even more years and billions on something that’s never going to happen.
Or at least not the way it wanted it to happen.
The third and probably most important reason is AI, which is clearly the next big thing, and it’s what Apple is now diverting attention (and funds) to.
Every big tech name in the world is throwing money at AI because it affects everything, from the car world to the smartphone sector.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, even used the t-word: trillion.
He said funding the next phase of AI projects will require at least eight trillion dollars.
It would have been interesting to experience the Apple Car but, alas, it’s not going to happen now.
