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Apple’s much-anticipated electric vehicle (EV) will have its design simplified to include fewer self-driving features, and the launch date delayed by at least two years, according to Bloomberg.
The product is believed to have been under development since 2014, with initial ambitions for a late-2010s launch.
Apple is said to have dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars annually on salaries, cloud computing space and testing facilities to ‘Project Titan’. A successful launch could make it a competitor to Tesla, Amazon-backed Rivian and established automakers introducing self-driving features to their cars. Other tech giants muscling into the autonomous vehicle sector include Google parent company Alphabet.
Apple’s secretive project has seen multiple changes in leadership and strategy in the past decade. Doug Field, for instance, joined Apple in 2018 after heading engineering at Tesla, and left in 2021 for Ford. Reportedly, his departure was in part due to doubt that Apple leadership would ever give its EV their final approval.
For all these vicissitudes, it would appear that Apple has not yet reached the prototype stage.
The EV was originally intended to have no pedals or steering wheel. Instead, it would have extensive self-driving features that would place it at the highest level of autonomy, level 5: capable of all driving tasks under all conditions. This was soon reduced to level 4 autonomy: capable of all driving tasks under certain conditions, such as on North American highways. However, these ambitions have now been scaled back even further. Instead, it will aim to operate at ‘level 2+’, with simultaneous autonomous lane centring and cruise control. This would place its self-driving abilities approximately in line with the autopilot driver assistance system available in Tesla EVs.
After an initial debut at level 2+, Apple hopes to shift to an upgraded system at level 4.
Bloomberg reported that the EV’s release date has been pushed back to 2028 at the earliest, after its previous release date of 2026 was abandoned. If Apple is not able to deliver an EV by this date, leadership might “seriously reconsider the project’s existence”, Bloomberg said.
The Bloomberg report – based on interviews with people having internal discussions about Project Titan – said that Apple’s board questioned its leaders about it throughout 2023. The decision to scale back on self-driving features and delay further was made after meetings that included Apple CEO Tim Cook and current Project Titan head Kevin Lynch.
A successful break into the high-end EV market might just be the audacious move Apple needs to reinvigorate itself after revenue growth stalled in 2023.
