One of the most ambitious initiatives in the company’s history, Apple Inc. is abandoning a ten-year endeavor to construct an electric automobile, according to people with knowledge of the subject.
According to insiders who asked not to be named because the news was private, Apple surprised the almost 2,000 employees working on the project on Tuesday when it made the internal disclosure. According to the persons, Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Vice President Kevin Lynch, who oversaw the project, discussed the choice.
The two executives informed the workers that the project will start to wind down and that many members of the automobile team, known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG, will be moving to the executive John Giannandrea’s artificial intelligence business. These workers will concentrate on generative AI initiatives, which are becoming a higher priority for the business.
There are several hundred hardware engineers and auto designers in the Apple automobile team. They might be able to apply for positions on other Apple teams. The number of layoffs is unknown, but there will be some.
The CEO of Tesla Inc., Elon Musk, praised the action as well. With a saluting emoji, he posted something on X.
The project’s ultimate termination, which ends a multibillion-dollar endeavor that would have propelled Apple into an entirely new industry, is a bombshell for the business. Around 2014, the tech giant began development on an automobile, aiming for a completely driverless electric car with a limo-like interior and voice-guided navigation.
However, the project was never easy to work on, and Apple had to make multiple changes to the team’s strategy and leadership. A few years ago, Lynch and Williams assumed control of the project after Doug Field, who is currently a senior executive at Ford Motor Company, left.
The people said that in recent weeks, Apple’s highest ranking executives made the decision to terminate the project. The most current strategy that was explored internally involved moving back the deployment date of cars to 2028 and lowering the bar for self-driving technology from Level 4 to Level 2+.
Apple had most recently estimated that the automobile will cost about $100,000. Executives, however, expressed concerns about the car’s ability to generate the profit margins that Apple usually does for its goods. The board of the corporation expressed concerns about expending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on an undertaking that might never materialize.
Apple keeps making significant investments in various fields. Over the previous five years, the corporation has invested $113 billion in research and development, with an average annual growth rate of almost 16%. The company has also grown that business since launching the Vision Pro headset, which is its first new product category in over ten years.