Apple, a pioneer company in the technological revolution of Silicon Valley, has understood that cobbler to your shoes.
The Mac or iPhone brand abandons its project to manufacture an electric car with autonomous capabilities after investing billions of dollars in more than a decade in a secret initiative. That “clandestine” group within this giant was known internally as project Titan.
Some experts saw there a work with the capacity to transform the automobile industry, given the innovative capacity of the protagonists. The cars would be transformed into computers on wheels and screens, which seemed to fit their philosophy.
The executives of the company with the bitten apple informed their employees this Tuesday that they were ruling out the plan. A twist. Participants in this development will now shift their goals to focus on efforts to create generative artificial intelligence, the latest major business niche and new frontier in technological challenge.
Meanwhile, Apple has been acquiring more than 20 AI and machine learning tools from different startups since 2017, without making much noise. And the use of this technology in new products has increasingly increased.
About 2,000 employees were assigned to participate in the development of the electric car, including vehicle designers and hardware engineers. Despite this announced job relocation, it is not ruled out that layoffs may occur.
The change in business parameters took many by surprise. Just two weeks ago, the company was testing one of its 67 vehicles designed to operate without a driver on the Sunnyvale Freeway, according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMW).
But despite the increase in experiments and analyzes of its cars over the past year, Apple's prototypes were far behind the leaders in this race.
The DMW documentation indicates that the company only had permits to test its autonomous vehicles as long as they had a human driver behind the wheel who could take charge of the car immediately. This slow progress contrasts even more when compared to initiatives such as Waymo, owned by Alphabet (parent company of Google), which has been offering driverless taxi services in San Francisco and Phoenix for a few months.
The purpose of investigating autonomous cars dates back to 2010. The planning evolved from a fully autonomous vehicle to something less ambitious consisting of the creation of driver assistance functions such as those popularized by Tesla.
In favor of the company that Steve Jobs elevated and today runs Tim Cook played its aura of launching truly innovative and easy-to-use products. The example that is always cited is that of the iPhone, a smartphone for digital illiterates.
There was a belief that if they had this technology in vehicles, its result would cause many problems for the competition. However, that car was seen as a distant threat due to how complex its construction is. As promising as it was, shareholders breathed a sigh of relief upon learning that this project was shelved.
