That's the news. Apple spent more than $10.000 billion working on the "Apple Car" in the last decade, according to a publication from none other than The New York Times that details all the problems that the project known as Titan faced during its development. Apple began investing in its autonomous car in 2014 and has been working on it until 2024, when, as we mentioned a few days ago, would have been cancelled.
From Cupertino money was spent on R&D, along with the thousands of engineers and automotive experts who worked on the project. Some Apple employees are said to have suspected the project was going to fail from the start, referring to the car as "the Titanic disaster" instead of its codename "Project Titan."
Tim Cook gave his approval to the project, but the car team members would always have thought it was going to be almost impossible. This would be because an electric vehicle with autonomous driving capabilities would have to cost at least $100.000, with Very tight margins and tough competition like Tesla and the Chinese electric car market.
Although Apple held talks with Elon Musk about a possible purchase of Tesla, the company decided that building its own car made more sense than trying to integrate Tesla into Apple. Back in 2014, Musk confirmed that he had had "conversations" with Apple, but said at the time that an acquisition seemed "very unlikely."
After it was cancelled, the more than 2.000 employees who were focused on the Apple Car project are being redeployed. Some will join other Apple teams to work on AI and other technologies (most of them), and others will be laid off. However, not all the investment has been in vain, Apple will apply much of what it learned in Project Titan and apply it to other devices such as AirPods with AI, cameras, and in the future the Vision Pro.