Apple has finally given up on making cars.
On February 27th local time in the United States, according to media reports, Apple has terminated its "Titan Plan" aimed at making cars internally, and the market may no longer have the opportunity to see "Apple Cars".
This major decision was made jointly by Apple's Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Vice President Kevin Lynch, who was responsible for the project, which shocked a car manufacturing team of nearly 2000 people. Apple's automotive project has been launched for over 10 years, with an investment of up to one billion US dollars.
After the termination of the plan, a considerable portion of the SPG team (special project team, i.e. automotive team) will be transferred to the related business of generative artificial intelligence. The latter belongs to the artificial intelligence department and is led by executive John Giannandrea. The remaining employees also include hundreds of hardware engineers and automotive designers, who may face reassignment or layoffs.
According to insiders, Apple's management has only completed this decision in recent weeks. Just a month ago, the media reported that Apple, which had repeatedly skipped tickets, seemed to be still in the planning phase, and the release date was postponed to 2028. In terms of technical direction, Apple has chosen to reduce dimensionality after a long-term breakthrough, changing from the rumored L4 level autonomous driving to L2+. Looking back, this may be the final hesitation and struggle of the project.
Over the past 10 years, Apple has made multiple attempts in car manufacturing projects, accompanied by the departure of key figures and multiple reorganizations. The departure of former Ford executive Doug Field was a significant one, and the project was subsequently handed over to Williams and Lynch.
The job hopping of another core member, Novotney, is also seen as negative news. He has nearly 25 years of work experience at Apple and has played an important role in the development of products such as iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Novotney joined RIVIAN, a new American automaker, in January of this year.
In addition to the bottleneck of technological breakthroughs faced by the company itself, market changes have also had a crucial impact on this costly plan.
At present, the global sales of new energy vehicles have almost bid farewell to the trend of rapid growth. In the Chinese market, data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers shows that the year-on-year growth rate of new energy vehicle sales in China has significantly decreased from 93.4% in 2022 to 37.9% in 2023. According to UBS Group's forecast, the growth rate of electric vehicle sales in the United States will decrease from 47% in 2023 to 11% this year.
At the same time, in the field of new energy vehicles, both traditional automakers and new car manufacturing forces are almost inevitably involved in low-priced competition, even Tesla is no exception. If this is destined to be the price trend of products in this field in the consumer market, it will be detrimental to Apple's pricing model, which is mainly based on high profit margins.
Not to mention, Tesla, which is most likely to become Apple's main competitor, has already iterated ahead of its core capabilities in manufacturing processes, autonomous driving, and more for many years. Even Apple, accustomed to leading industry product standards, is still struggling to catch up with Tesla before entering mass production.
Apple may be regretful to the outside world for stalling on this costly and uncertain project, but investors in the company generally accept it with great enthusiasm. After the news was exposed, Apple rose 0.81% to close at $182.63 per share in the US stock market, and rose slightly by 0.24% to $183.06 per share after hours.