Foreign media said Apple's chief operating officer Jeff Williams and vice president Kevin Lynch, who is in charge of the car building project, have announced internally on Tuesday (February 27) that they have abandoned the car building project, and many of the employees in the car building project team will be transferred to the machine learning and AI department led by John Giannandrea, and turn to the generative artificial intelligence project, which is an increasingly important matter on the company's schedule is becoming more and more important. As for the hundreds of hardware and automotive engineers on the team, they'll have the opportunity to apply for jobs in other project groups, while layoffs are also a likely scenario.
Apple building a car was first spurred on by Tesla. After the huge success of the iPhone, Apple didn't do well in the new innovation phase, although it wanted to smarten up most of the industry all over again: the Apple Watch hasn't been a game changer, Apple is just catching up with Amazon in terms of smart speakers, and other smart headphones and the like have only really failed to beat the traditional listening market, including the current HMD headset The Apple Vision Pro, which Apple calls a revolutionary spatial computing device that seamlessly integrates digital content into the real world, allowing users to be in the moment and stay connected to others, is also far from a pop hit.
In 2014, Apple obviously want to do something in the field of transportation, Apple set up the Apple Car project team, approved by Cook that year, Apple launched the Titan program, and then play "money ability" from Google, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla and other companies to poach, set up a Silicon Valley + automotive industry genes of the core team. The initial ambition of the core team is to create a L5 level fully autonomous driving luxury cars.
Its car design concept is also basically the same as Tesla's car, including a new car interface, the operating system of the future car, etc. Apple will enhance and unify these components and transform them into something unexpected. It's Apple's "voodoo" of finding something that works and making it better.
And the whole idea behind Tesla Motors, especially the minimalist Model 3, is deeply Apple. In fact Tesla sought Apple's help when it had a financial crisis during mass production of its cars, and Musk responded to a Twitter message by mentioning that in the darkest days of the Model 3 program, he contacted Apple CEO Tim Cook to sell Tesla to Apple at one-tenth of its current value, at which time Cook declined to meet.
And Apple poached over 300 people from Tesla by the end of 2019. Later, Apple's repeated wavering on the route and direction of building a car, as well as the delay in landing a partner and form of cooperation, led to a mass exodus of executives involved in the Titan program, and the project was stalled several times.
During this time the company has explored countless design options and faced the enormous challenge of developing self-driving technology. Since 2017, Apple has utilized Lexus SUVs for road testing, accumulating dozens of vehicles across the United States. Additionally, Apple has secretly tested some of its components on the Phoenix track, which once belonged to Chrysler.
In 2022, Apple lowered its target to "2026 launch, L4 level self-driving", during which time it was reported that Apple had made a large number of adjustments to the car project plan, resulting in the departure of the original project team members, Apple hopes that the new team can design a new production model out. In January of this year, the revelations show that Apple will be adjusted downward to "L2 + level of autonomous driving, 2028 on the market", the purpose is also to reduce the difficulty of mass production.
However, changes in the market has brought more pressure for Apple. As the electric car market has cooled somewhat, the enthusiasm of mainstream buyers for pure electric cars is waning, and sales growth has lost momentum. Traditional automakers such as General Motors and Ford have shifted to hybrid production after facing low demand and production bottlenecks for pure electric vehicles. The industry as a whole is sharply lowering prices, production targets and profit expectations for pure electric vehicles.
Apple had envisioned pricing the Apple Car in the $100,000 bracket, but executives were so concerned about whether that price would provide the high profit margins they've grown accustomed to and the hundreds of millions of dollars the company was spending each year to feed a project that might never come to fruition that Apple management made the difficult decision in recent weeks to painfully axe the entire car project.
Tesla, which is already working on an electric car priced in the $30,000 bracket for L2+ autopilot, has warned of a "significant slowdown" in expansion this year. UBS forecasts that U.S. EV sales growth will plummet to 11 percent this year, down from 47 percent in 2023.
But Apple is still strengthening its CarPlay software, which allows drivers to use the iPhone's maps, Siri and other features in the car to integrate with the vehicle's controls and entertainment systems, with members of the team reporting to Williams, who is in charge of software engineering for the AppleWatch. Apple hopes that by building partnerships with automakers, rather than competing directly, it will extend it to more models to open up its own software ecosystem and not disappear from the automotive industry. In fact there are already many consumers are accustomed to using CarPlay software to enhance the driving experience of the car they buy, Apple's influence on the automotive software industry has been very strong.
At the same time Apple has thickened the resources of its automotive program with its machine learning and AI division, shifting to generative AI programs, which is also the current focus of the tech industry. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently confirmed that Apple will be rolling out generative AI features "later this year," while rumors suggest the company is testing AI updates for Spotlight and Xcode.
Machine learning and AI has slowly proved to be the real technology direction of Industry 4.0, through the digitalization to transform the original analog simulation manufacturing industry, through the traditional database to derive a large model, and then combined with the new physical, digital algorithms to quickly re-generate a new industrial productivity, to the traditional hardware products to increase the "AI intelligent brain "To realize the autonomous productivity of traditional hardware products, in order to improve the level of productivity and economic efficiency of society as a whole.
Such as this year's hot SORA and Tesla's FSDV12, are through the vision so that AI can understand and even simulate the real physical world. According to Tesla Musk, "FSD12 and Sora are but two blossoming results on AI's ability to perceive the world and understand it through vision, with FSD ultimately used for driving behavior and Sora used to generate video."
Which Apple's original car project in the vast majority of the research results, can also be transplanted to its Apple Vision Pro realized in the spatial computing platform, if Apple's spatial computing platform really play a role in productivity, it will be a truly epochal technological innovation, once successful, the current market manufactured products, are likely to be made through the spatial computing technology, re Once successful, the products currently manufactured on the market may be rebuilt through space computing technology, and the future of the automobile may not necessarily be what it is now, or if people still need the automobile as a tool in the era of space computing, it is not known.
For Apple to stop the car project, the world's new car-making forces showed a markedly different reaction, such as Tesla Musk said he agreed, ideal car also thinks that Apple's choice of strategy and time point is correct, Xiaopeng is a little unexpected not clear about the significance of Apple's out of the cards, Xiaomi is expressed shock.
