After spending years and billions on it, Apple has decided to scrap its self-driving Apple car project.
As you can imagine, they did it because they want to focus on something else.
And that’s the *something else* everyone in the world is obsessed with right now.
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In theory, Apple never officially announced they were working on a car.
However, the first hint came when the Cupertino giant started spending tens of billions on car-related R&D.
Elon Musk summed it quite nicely in an interview with the BBC.
“It’s [like] an open secret and it’s pretty obvious [that Apple wants to make a car]. It’s pretty hard to hide something if you hire over a thousand engineers to do it,” Musk said.
What’s crazy is the interview took place eight years ago, in 2016, which means Apple spent nearly a decade working on a project it then decided to scrap.
The tech company also spent years testing different cars made by other manufacturers, and even contemplated partnering up with another automaker to build the car.
They also filed a bunch of trademarks and patents for it.
However, they’ve now decided to scrap it.
In a recent board meeting, Tim Cook allegedly said the Apple car, codenamed Project Titan and Project 172, would be delayed.
And then, just a few weeks later, during yet another meeting, he said the project will be scrapped altogether.
In both cases, the meeting was private but somebody ‘leaked’ the information to Bloomberg.
The same person, who remains anonymous, said the main reason why Apple decided to cancel its plan to build a car is AI.
Artificial Intelligence is all the rage at the minute, from Elon Musk’s new company to the omnipresent chatbots from OpenAI, Google and Microsoft – but Apple has been taking it slow when it comes to AI.
This is probably because Apple, especially under Tim Cook, doesn’t generally care to be the first, they aim to be the best.
Or, more accurately, the best when it comes to providing the most seamless experience.
Presumably that’s what they’re working on with AI.
The images for this article were created using AI.
