Nearly two thousand employees find themselves out of work. The “Titan project”, more commonly known as “Apple Car” in the general press, would beabandoned. It was Jeff Williams, number two at Apple and tipped to become its next general director, who would have announced it to the engineers assigned to this secret department. Confidential, because Cupertino has never publicly confirmed that its teams were clearly working on such an innovation. Just Tim Cook, current CEO of the Apple firm,had mentioned it half-heartedlyduring an interview with a KTLA reporter in 2021.
Numerous documents filed with the USPTO (equivalent to the French INPI in the United States) also allowed us to imagine what was going on internally. We knew, for example, that Apple wanted to install screens on the bodywork, visible to other users of the road network.A driverless vehicle test circuitbelonging to the Californian company had also been seen in the American desert. But today, all this would be put aside. No one really knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in this adventure, but it probably even amounts to billions according to observers.
Few layoffs in sight, despite everything?
According to journalist Mark Gurman of the magazineBloomberg, Apple employees assigned to the Titan project will not all be fired. It is rumored that the company intends to relocate its workforce, now further promoting the development of its department.artificial intelligence. And this is understandable: the proprietary voice assistant Siri is today still light years away from the performance offered by Google with its Assistant or Gemini. Microsoft is also well advanced in the field, with its investment of more than ten billion dollars in OpenAI, publisher of DALL-E and ChatGPT. Apparently, Apple also has its alternative in the pipeline, perhaps calledAsk. But again, it's difficult to know more because the developer communicates very little on the subject.
The decision to end the Apple Car project was reportedly made by the board of directorsin recent weeks. Or after the initiative has already taken a turn for the worse. We already reported last year that the development of the car was, it seems, on hold for an indefinite period. Previously, the manufacturer would have liked to leave aside the manufacture of an automobile to focus on the release of an intelligent autonomous driving system. The software, based on a time-of-flight radar (LiDAR), could then have been marketed as a white label to other companies.
Among the subcontractors mentioned in the collaboration with Apple for its connected vehicle,Nissan, Foxconn or evenBMW, great andHyundaihad already been mentioned in the past. But no decision would have been finalized, again.
The way is clear for Tesla
Surprisingly,the price of AAPL stock on the Wall Street stock exchange quickly increased in valuefollowing this announcement ofBloombergpublished yesterday afternoon in the United States. It therefore seems that shareholders firmly believe in Apple's potential in terms of artificial intelligence; whoever lives will see.
The group, with a capitalization of nearly three thousand billion dollars, is currently positioned number two in global valuations, compared to eleventh place for the company which now presents itself as its former competitor: Tesla. Its share price jumped following Mark Gurman's article, before returning close to its initial position.
Tesla already markets autonomous cars, including the Model S (high-end sedan), the Model 3 (consumer), the Roadster (sports coupe) and the Model X (SUV).
- Apple has been working on an autonomous and electric car project for ten years
- According to a journalist, the project, one of the company's most ambitious, is abandoned
- Many of the employees who worked on this project were transferred to Apple's artificial intelligence department.
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