Apple has reportedly abandoned the idea of creating its own electric car, and a new report from journalist Mark Gurman may have just revealed what motivated this surprising decision internally.
If Apple is known for its innovations in several areas such as smartphones or computers. However, the company would not have succeeded in finding the right formula to enter the electric vehicle market. After years of research and development, the company finally put an end to this ambitious project last week.
So what went wrong? According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple’s overconfidence and unrealistic expectations doomed the project from the start. The company thought it could create a better car than Tesla and the rest of the auto industry, but it underestimated the complexity and challenges of the market.
The Apple Car will probably never see the light of day
Apple started working on the car project around ten years ago, with two possible approaches: a less ambitious electric vehicle with some autonomy functions, similar to Tesla models, or a revolutionary self-driving car that would take passengers from point A to point B without any human intervention. Apple chose the latter option, thinking it could solve a problem that the automotive industry is still struggling to solve today.
The problem is that the company quickly realized that developing a Level 5 autonomous driving system, the highest level of autonomy, was not as easy as it seemed. . This technology requires billions of dollars of investment, rigorous testing and regulatory approval. The design team also focused on a car without a steering wheel and pedals, thus limiting the user’s control and choices.
When Apple changed course a few years ago, it was too late. The company had wasted valuable time and resources on a project that was too far ahead of its time. She also faced other problems, such as the high cost and low profit margin of the car, the indecision of the project team and the production difficulties associated with making a car.
Apple lost billions of dollars on Project Titan
Apple’s failure to launch a car shows that the automobile market is much more difficult to penetrate than that of smartphones or computers, which is why the arrival of new players such as Xiaomi and its SU7 electric sedan show that some companies have still managed to find the right formula.
According to the Times, Apple had finally “spent more than $10 billion on the project and the car was back to its early days as an electric vehicle with driver-assist features rivaling those of Tesla, according to a half-dozen people who worked on the project over the last decade“. But the project was doomed to failure.largely because developing software and algorithms for a car with self-driving capabilities proved too difficult“.
If it had come to market, an Apple car would likely have cost at least $100,000 and would have generated minimal profit compared to the smartphones or other devices currently on sale from Apple. Apple spent crazy sums to bring more than 2,000 employees to Apple Park, including engineers who had worked for NASA and developed racing cars for Porsche. The Times even reveals that the company “had developed a range of new technologies, including a windshield capable of displaying driving directions and a sunroof with a special polymer to reduce the sun’s heat“. The abandonment of the project is therefore regrettable for technology fans, since some could have pushed the competition to invest even more in research.
