Apple is abandoning its decade-long effort to construct an electrical automobile in favor of ramping up efforts on its generative AI projects, in line with a report.
Apple announced the plans internally on Tuesday, sources told Bloomberg, rattling its nearly 2,000 staffers working on the self-driving vehicle, which was initially intended to launch sometime in 2026.
The choice was shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, a vice chairman overseeing the trouble, the people told Bloomberg, asking to not be identified when discussing private matters.
The 2 Apple executives told staffers that because the Cupertino, Calif.-based company winds down the team working on the automobile — known internally because the Special Projects Group, or SPG — some will probably be shifted to the factitious intelligence division.
These staffers will now deal with generative AI projects under executive John Giannandrea, in line with Bloomberg, as Apple looks to get on top of things to rivals Microsoft, which has a $10 billion multiyear agreement with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Google — though the tech giant is currently in hot water over its “woke” Gemini text-to-image software.
A whole lot of others within the SPG — a lot of that are hardware engineers and automobile designers — can either apply for an additional job inside Apple or will probably be laid off.
It’s unclear what number of will probably be axed.
Representatives for Apple didn’t immediately reply to The Post’s request for comment.
The choice to ditch Project Titan kicked off in 2014 with the goal of making fully self-driving vehicles with luxurious interiors and voice-guided navigation, in line with Bloomberg.
Nevertheless, Project Titan has struggled nearly from its inception. When Apple executed test drives around tis Silicon Valley headquarters in 2022, it had trouble navigating streets — when it regularly bumped into curbs, veered out of lanes and into the center of intersections and even nearly hit a jogger.
A revolving door of departing executives had also plagued this system.
Williams and Lynch took over the undertaking a couple of years ago following the departure of Doug Field, now a senior executive at Ford, in line with Bloomberg.
Ian Goodfellow, a renowned scientist who headed the machine-learning division inside Project Titan, also left the corporate back in 2022.
Apple’s self-driving automobile was originally intended to differ from those being developed by rivals comparable to Google-backed Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise since it could have no steering wheel and pedals, with interiors designed around hands-off driving.
Troubles along the way in which had it reduce its ambitious plans — by adding a steering wheel and pedals — and delay its launch from 2025 to 2026, though it was still anticipted to tout a $100,000 price tag.
Meanwhile, Apple released its long-awaited Vision Pro earlier this month for a sticker-shocking $3,500, though customers were reportedly returning the virtual reality headset just weeks after purchasing it.
Greater than 200,000 pairs of the groundbreaking goggles were sold during pre-order before being released to the general public on Feb. 2.
But while some frenzied fans say the Vision Pro will revolutionize the tech industry, other peeved purchasers are already returning theirs to the Apple Store, citing extreme headaches, nauseousness, motion sickness and “eye fatigue.”