RIP Apple Car. This Is Why It Died

Any tech company moving into the auto space needs a manufacturing partner. But Apple’s EV died as it lived: alone.

After a decade of rumors, secretive developments, executive entrances and exits, and pivots, Apple reportedly told employees yesterday that its car project, internally called “Project Titan,” is no more. Those working on the technology of some four-odd hype cycles ago—electric, autonomous vehicles—will reportedly now focus on the vaunted advancement of the day, generative AI. The project wind-down was first reported by Bloomberg; TechCrunch reports the restructuring of Project Titan will likely include layoffs.

“Prototypes are easy, volume production is hard, positive cash flow is excruciating,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted a few years back. It’s a lesson that would-be car companies—as well as Tesla—seem to learn again and again. Even after a decade of work, Apple never quite got to the first step. (Granted, the company, not one for half-baked prototype reveals, reportedly blanketed any other firm that touched its automotive project with nondisclosure agreements.)

Designing and manufacturing a car is complex work. To pull it off, global auto manufacturers generally maintain relationships with thousands of suppliers responsible for their own individual hardware or software widgets. Apple seems to have concluded it is better off without that particular headache.

Any tech company hoping to break into the automotive space “needs partnerships,” says K. Venkatesh Prasad, the senior vice president and chief innovation officer at the Center for Automotive Research, a nonprofit research organization. The same is true for any automaker hoping to compete with the tech natives, he says.

Contrast the Apple car’s fate with the trajectory of other tech giants still publicly pursuing auto projects, and this may be where the Cupertino company’s experiment went awry.

Rumors of manufacturing partnerships on the brink of building the Apple car have been endemic, with Canadian manufacturer Magna International, Korean battery-builder LG, Chinese ride-hail and autonomous software developer Didi Chuxing, and US electric carmaker Canoo all floated as potential partners.

In 2021, Hyundai confirmed that the Korean automaker was in early talks to develop a car with Apple, which might have been manufactured at its Kia assembly plant in Georgia. Apple car representatives reportedly met with European manufacturers as late as last month.

But no partnerships officially came to be.

Partnerships, however, have been the crux of other tech-car schemes. Sony has formed a joint venture with Honda to build an electric prototype called Afeela, due to ship in 2026. Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida told The Wall Street Journal that visiting the tooling, welding, and painting shop at Honda’s Ohio assembly plant confirmed that working together was the right move for the electronics company. “That would be rough to do on our own,” he said. “It turns out you really do need a partner.”

Chinese smartphone-makers are particularly eager to break in to selling cars, with the hopes of propping up flagging phone sales. And a lot of them are teaming up with more traditional auto players to do it. Xiaomi unveiled its first electric vehicle late last year and has announced its intention to become a top global automaker, with a manufacturing assist from state-owned automaker BAIC Group. Baidu is working with the Geely Holding Group on its EV. Telecoms giant Huawei and manufacturer Chery Automobile unveiled an electric car last November under the new brand Luxeed.

All these firms seek to capitalize on what Apple recognized a decade ago: The software and connectivity now built in to new autos gave tech incumbents a jump on traditional auto-builders. But those advantages haven’t always proven out.

Project Titan had plenty of other challenges. High-profile executives from tech companies, tech-inspired automakers like Tesla, and legacy automakers alike joined and then left the program, reportedly frustrated by the project’s shifting timeline and ambitions. Meanwhile, the autonomous vehicle industry changed around it, going from moonshot darling of the tech space to a still-challenging engineering problem facing technical and regulatory headwinds.

By the time Apple wrapped up the car project, Bloomberg reported that it had drastically scaled down its ambitions from developing a legitimate self-driving car to building an electric vehicle with now familiar driver-assistance automated features of the kind automakers including Tesla, General Motors, and Ford have had on the road now for years.

Yet, despite this downgrading, Apple still drove more autonomous vehicle testing miles last year than ever before, according to reports the company submitted to a California state agency. Apple did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

However, Apple still has a significant foothold in the automotive industry, thanks to its CarPlay infotainment system. Plenty of drivers prefer their iPhone’s car integration to the technology that automakers have built from scratch. Indeed, anticipation is increasing for the release this year in the US of the next generation of CarPlay, which dramatically increases functions of the Apple’s in-car UI, with control over multiple screens, camera integration, vehicle monitoring, climate control, and a wealth of driving-related data, including a vehicle's average speed, fuel efficiency, and energy efficiency.

And despite the global car industry being taken completely by surprise at Apple’s 2022 WWDC announcement of the significantly expanded features of new CarPlay—with many refusing to even comment on the software’s new abilities, much less confirm its adoption—most of the major players have now confirmed it will be coming to their vehicles. BMW, Audi, Cadillac, Buick, Chery, Chevrolet, Ford, Honda, Jeep, Fiat, Land Rover, Lucid, Mercedes, Toyota, and many more have signed up.

One indicator of the importance of CarPlay for auto OEMs comes from Hyundai Motor Group president Song Chang-Hyeon, a former Apple and Microsoft engineer who heads the group's software development division. Song told WIRED at CES in January that his very first task after being appointed to the board in 2021 was to fix the glaring omission of wireless CarPlay integration in its vehicles, ensuring that untethered Apple access would finally appear in Kia’s new flagship, the all-electric EV9.

Clearly, for Apple, “this is not the end. This is just the beginning of the game,” says Prasad, the automotive researcher. “This is a very exciting reset in so many different ways.”

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