The stock market is like a game of chess. When opening an account, it's important to plan ahead and seize investment opportunities at any time!
According to the latest report of MacRumors, the technology media, at the request of Apple, the California Motor Vehicle Authority (DMV) has cancelled the company's autonomous vehicle test license on September 27, which means that Apple's car building project has been terminated or is firmly established.
It is worth noting that this test license is not a "passive recall", but rather an acknowledgement notice from Apple to the DMV on September 25th to cancel the license. In fact, if it had not been cancelled, the license could have been valid until April 30, 2025.
Previously, Apple's research and development process can be traced back to 2014, with the ultimate vision of creating an L5 level fully autonomous electric vehicle. According to the regulations of California, the company needs to apply to DMV for permission before it can test autonomous vehicle on California roads. Since Apple was approved and licensed by the DMV on April 14, 2017, it has used cars equipped with sensors and cameras for road testing.
At first, Apple did not have many licensed and registered cars and drivers, only covering 3 cars and 6 drivers, all of which were 2015 Lexus RX450h models. By July 2023, the Apple Car project team had registered 152 test drivers and 66 test vehicles in the DMV.
During road testing, Apple has encountered many accidents, such as on August 24, 2018, a test vehicle was rear ended while preparing to merge into a highway; In October of the same year, the vehicle skidded and collided with other vehicles while turning However, these things do not seem to change Apple's ambition to build cars. According to DMV's public data, last year Apple's autonomous vehicle road test team reached 720000 kilometers on California roads, a sharp increase over the previous year.
On the other hand, Apple has repeatedly lowered its expectations for autonomous driving levels, from the initial "L5 level" to the "L4 level" in 2022, and then to this year's "L2+level". At the same time, the launch date of automobiles has been repeatedly postponed from 2026 to 2028.
In February this year, the situation was even worse. After spending billions of dollars or even decades of research and development time, Apple finally announced that it would cancel all plans to release autonomous vehicle, and cut or reassigned nearly 2000 employees in the project. Many employees were transferred to machine learning and AI departments to turn to generative AI projects.