It is “the effort of a decade”, even “Apple’s most ambitious project” which has just been “cancelled”, “deleted” for lack of a clear strategy. The subject has been in the news for several hours and the American press is not kind. “After a decade of Odyssey, Apple puts an end to its electric car project”, headlines the American press agency Bloomberg who revealed the information this Tuesday, February 27 evening. “Apple kills its project”, points out Washington Post. “Apple’s electric car is dead”, dares the specialized site The Verge. While the British daily The Guardian notes the end of a resource-intensive project, announcing layoffs to come.
On Tuesday, internally, Apple revealed that it was putting an end to its electric car project, surprising the nearly 2,000 employees affiliated with the program. The announcement was not made public, specifies the media Bloomberg reporting that the decision was shared by the director of operations, Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, vice-president in charge of technologies at Apple. The executive also said that many employees of the automotive team, known as the “Special Projects Group”, or “Titan” project, will be transferred to the artificial intelligence division to focus on projects. Generative AI, an increasingly important priority for the company. Many of them could, however, be forced to be dismissed according to the American press.
Billions of dollars gone
Apple has reportedly spent billions of dollars for nearly ten years trying to develop a semi-autonomous electric vehicle. “Its decision to end the program constitutes a major step backwards compared to its previous strategy,” notes the Guardian. This decision constitutes a “real bomb for the company”, comments Bloombergbecause the project was worth several billion dollars and would have propelled him into a whole new sector of activity.
In recent years, Apple CEO Tim Cook had made several allusions to the company’s plans for an electric car, although he never fully committed to delivering a product. The project, however, has been a source of intense speculation among the automotive and technology industries. And for good reason: the company hired executives from renowned automakers such as Lamborghini and Tesla to oversee its development, and acquired the autonomous vehicle start-up Drive.ai in 2019.
A battered strategy
Apple began working on a car in 2014, hoping to design a fully autonomous electric vehicle with a voice-activated navigation system. And if the decision to end its program is so surprising, it’s because just two weeks ago the company was caught testing one of its 67 vehicles equipped with autonomous capabilities on a highway. from California.
But despite the increase in testing over the past year, “Apple’s self-driving electric car efforts lag far behind other industry leaders,” notes the Washington Post, noting that Apple only had permits to test in California with a human behind the wheel, ready to take over at a moment’s notice. Too little of a victory when we know that the current leader in the field, Waymo, owned by Alphabet, has been offering fully driverless robotaxi trips to customers in San Francisco and Phoenix for months.
According to the website The Verge, the apple brand has experienced a series of problems, including significant staff turnover, a changing strategy, and “internal skepticism”. According to the site, reports also suggested that the car, which was rumored to remain under the $100,000 threshold, would not have the advanced autonomous driving capabilities that the company had initially hoped for.
“This represents a small disappointment, because in Cupertino [NDLR : le siège d’Apple, NDLR]”, we thought that with around 2,000 employees, an Apple Car was still on the horizon in the medium term”, reacted Dan Ives, analyst at the investment company Wedbush Securities, in a note. But this also means that the Apple brand “is focused on accelerating and executing a broad generative AI strategy within the Apple ecosystem, which is clearly the right decision for the company going forward,” he said. he added.