Everything we knew about the Apple Car is now a story of what could have been

The Apple Car isn’t happening, we’ve known that for a while.

After spending a decade and billions of dollars on it, Apple decided to abandon the idea to build a car.

It’s a shame, because based on what we’ve learned about it through the years, it could’ve been great.

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An Apple car with Level 4 autonomy

Apple filed several patents that gave us a few ideas about what the car could do.

It would have obviously run on iOS, with AI-specific features including Siri and seamless integration with iPhone and other Apple producs.

We also know that Apple wanted to make it a Level 4 self-driving car, which means it could drive itself without any help from the driver.

Apple signed an agreement with a legacy automaker

Numerous media outlets reported on more than one occasion that Apple was close to signing a deal with a legacy automaker.

Several names have been mentioned, including BMW, Honda and Hyundai.

As it turns out, it seems Apple did indeed sign a pre-agreement with Hyundai.

The idea was to let Hyundai do the ‘car stuff’, so that Apple could focus on software.

‘Project Titan’ was an open secret

The one thing we’ve known pretty much since the start was that the Apple Car had been internally codenamed ‘Project Titan’.

Not that long ago, an Apple engineer leaked information about the car, but the truth is, Project Titan was an open secret.

Rumors about it began spreading nearly a decade ago, and in a famous interview with the BBC in 2016, Elon Musk confirmed that Apple was indeed working on a car.

“It’s pretty hard to hide something [the fact Apple is developing a car, ed] when you hire 1,000 engineers to do it,” Musk said.

The reason why the Apple car died

There’s a famous expression that says you shouldn’t ‘throw good money after bad’.

This, simplified, is the reason why Apple canceled the car program.

Apple spent 10 years and billions of dollars developing the car, but the company eventually decided to write it off because of three main reasons.

First, they realized they would have spend even more to make it happen.

Second, they realized it would have been tricky to make it profitable.

The third, and probably the most important reason, was the fact that Apple realized they had to use that money somewhere else.

Namely, you’ve guessed it, AI.