Yahoo Autos Sounds Like Apple Is Giving Up on Building a Car
Apple's desire to enter the automotive sphere has been an open secret in Silicon Valley. First revealed in early 2015, the technology giant's "Project Titan" team has been quietly hiring auto industry experts and readying a plan to introduce some sort of autonomous or semi-autonomous electric car.
But now, all that seems to be changing, as insiders report a drastic shift in Apple's automotive ambitions.
Writing for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman and Alex Webb bring us the scoop. Speaking with numerous unnamed sources within Apple, Gurman and Webb portray a sea change at the Cupertino tech company.
Instead of building an Apple-branded vehicle, as was originally the apparent plan, the company now intends to focus on supplying autonomous driving software to established automakers, Bloomberg reports.
The shift has had massive fallout: Gurman and Webb report that hundreds of members from the thousand-person Titan team have been reassigned, terminated, or quit the project. Internal battles over the project's goals and feasibility created a toxic environment; "it was an incredible failure of leadership," an unnamed insider told Bloomberg.
Early this year, project head Steve Zadesky departed Titan. Formerly a Ford Motor Co. engineer who worked at Apple in the early days of the iPod, Zadesky handed his duties to Apple's Dan Riccio and Bob Mansfield.
As Bloomberg reports, after Zadesky's departure, Mansfield announced Project Titan's new direction to team members, explaining that Apple would no longer attempt to build its own vehicle to compete with the likes of Tesla. Instead, the tech company would focus on developing self-driving technology, including sensors, cameras, and the underlying software, in the hopes of licensing the technology to existing automakers.
The strategy shift makes sense. As Gurman and Webb point out, Apple enjoys huge profit margins and exclusive rights to certain components manufactured by suppliers. Compare this to the auto industry, with its complex and well-established relationships between traditional automakers and suppliers, as well as the astounding regulatory burden of putting a new car on the market. Breaking in to the century-old industry must have looked insurmountable to the Titan team.
The strategy shift was not without fallout: Layoffs, previously reported in the dozens, added up to hundreds, Bloomberg reports, with more than 120 software engineers and "several hundred" working on chassis and suspension design departing the company. Other engineers quit, fearing shaky job security and impending failure of Apple's plan.
Where does this leave Apple? It's unclear. The tech company was rumored to be in conversation with McLaren Technology Group, parent of the supercar company, though these talks were later denied. Bloomberg reports that Apple executives have given Project Titan leaders a deadline of late 2017 to prove the feasibility of an autonomous car system; a final decision will be made at that time.
So, at least for now, it sounds like the dream of an Apple-branded vehicle is dead. Whether Apple will find a way to enter the automotive industry by some other avenue remains to be seen.
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