Crash of the Titan: a short history of Apple’s doomed car project
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Apple’s long-rumored driverless car project, also known as Project Titan, has been shuttered. But the company didn’t announce its cancellation. In fact, Apple barely ever mentioned the secretive project despite laboring on it for nearly a decade.
Project Titan was obvious from the outside — from automotive industry hiring to heavily documented, public testing of self-driving cars, there was no way it could stay a secret. But the company still tried to preserve the mystery — when CEO Tim Cook was asked about the project on an investor call in 2016, he responded with cryptic talk about how exciting Christmas Eve is, adding that “it’s going to be Christmas Eve for a while.”
Now we know Cook’s Christmas never came. This week, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman broke the news that Apple will not be making a car, dashing the hopes of any Apple fan who dreamed of cruising around in a Jony Ive-designed roadster. But Apple’s car considerations go back a bit farther than 2014, the year early reports pegged the company’s first real moves to spin up Project Titan. A little over eight years ago, Nest founder Tony Fadell revealed that, while he was still at Apple, he and Steve Jobs had tossed around the idea for an Apple Car in 2008.
They agreed that, as cool as they thought that would be, Apple was just too busy. The company had only just released the iPhone — the iPad, Apple’s services business explosion, and Siri were still ahead of it.
But six years after Fadell and Jobs’ idle conversations, things were different. The company itself was the most valuable in the world, and its products were selling like hotcakes. Apple was full of momentum and growing fatter with cash every day, but there was no guarantee that its devices would keep the company expanding with their upward sales trajectory.
Looking down the line, Apple already had its hands, quite successfully, in so many pies — computers, phones, audio players, for instance, and it was preparing to launch its smartwatch and line of Bluetooth headphones. If it was going to light the world on fire again, it needed to go big with something — why, then, shouldn’t it make a car?
So began a nearly 10-year slog of sky-high expectations that even the world’s richest company couldn’t hope to meet. Apple has done a lot to push consumer electronics forward over the years. But nobody can do everything, and the Apple Car is as fine a cautionary tale about that as any.
February 2015: The rumor mill starts cranking in earnest after a self-driving Dodge Caravan with chunky sensors adorning the roof is spotted driving around California’s San Francisco Bay Area. A CBS News story at the time finds it’s leased to Apple, which has no testing permit for driverless cars. Nevertheless, it sparks speculation that the company is making an autonomous car.
Within days, reports emerge that Apple has been heavily recruiting auto experts for what it calls “Project Titan,” a secret effort to make an all-electric self-driving car. Cook reportedly approved the plan a year prior, and the company has set a team of 1,000 people on it, led by former Ford engineer Steve Zadesky. Apple hopes to start selling the car in 2020.
But can Apple actually pull this off? Former GM CEO Dan Akerson is maybe a touch skeptical. He tells Bloomberg, “We take steel, raw steel, and turn it into a car. They have no idea what they’re getting into if they get into that.”
July 2015: Reports said that Cook visited BMW’s headquarters in 2014. He and other executives wanted to learn about how the company makes its cars, and were reportedly keenly interested in the i3, BMW’s tiny electric hatchback. It’s the first rumbling of potential partnerships between Apple and an automaker, but the Reuters report on the meetings suggests that their talks have already faded.
September 2015: The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple expects to ship its car in 2019, and has tripled the original 600-person team. This same month, the California DMV confirms that it recently met with Apple to go over the DMV’s autonomous vehicle regulations.
October 2015: Sources from Mission Motors, an electric motorcycle startup, claim the company was bankrupted by Apple’s aggressive poaching.
Fall of 2015: Cook and Jony Ive meet at the project’s headquarters in Sunnyvale for an odd demo of what riding in a Siri-powered car could be like. According to the New York Times:
The two men sank into the seats of a cabinlike interior. Outside, a voice actor read from a script of what Siri would say as the men zoomed down the road in the imaginary car. Mr. Ive asked Siri what restaurant they passed and the actor read an answer, said two people familiar with the demonstration.
January 2016: Reports show that Apple, or at least a registrant claiming to be Apple, bought apple.cars and other, similarly automotive-themed domain names. But the first signs of trouble also appear as Zadesky departs Apple, leaving his post as head of the car project vacant.
April 2016: German outlet Handelsblatt reports that BMW / Daimler has given up on talks with Apple because Apple wants the platform to be built “into its own cloud software,” which apparently doesn’t sit well with BMW’s future strategy for customer data protection.
July 2016: Zadesky’s vacancy is filled by Bob Mansfield, Apple’s former hardware engineering boss, who had left the company’s executive team in 2013 but stayed on for special projects. At the same time, reports say the car is delayed to 2021, and that Mansfield has hired a former BlackBerry automotive software executive to focus on autonomous driving. Bloomberg reports that internally, employees are confused about Project Titan’s direction.
September 2016: Apple reportedly fires “dozens of employees” as it reconsiders its approach to the car project. Later that month, rumors circulate that Apple is thinking about buying British supercar company McLaren and self-balancing motorcycle startup Lit Motors. Neither ever happens.
October 2016: Apple has reportedly parked its plans to build its own car and will focus on creating self-driving software for other companies to use in their vehicles. Even so, Cook tosses a morsel to investors during an earnings call, saying that cars are “an area that it’s clear that there are a lot of technologies that will either become available or will be able to revolutionize the car experience.”
April 2017: The California DMV gives Apple a permit to test-drive three 2015 Lexus RX 450h SUVs outfitted with autonomous driving tech. One of these cars is seen driving around Silicon Valley.
