Apple Spent More Than $10 Billion on Apple Car Before Canceling Project

Apple spent more than $10 billion working on the Apple Car over the last decade, according to a report from The New York Times that details the issues the project faced during development. Apple first launched the project in 2014 and let it flounder for more than a decade before calling it off earlier this week.


Money was spent on research and development, along with the thousands of Apple engineers and car experts that worked on the project. Some employees within Apple are said to have suspected that the endeavor was likely to fail from the beginning, and they referred to the car as "the Titanic disaster" instead of its "Project Titan" codename.

Apple CEO Tim Cook signed off on the project, but members of the car team knew that it was going to be close to impossible. An electric vehicle with self-driving capabilities would need to cost at least $100,000, and it would have razor thin margins and stiff competition.

While Apple reportedly held discussions with Elon Musk about a possible purchase of Tesla, the company decided that building its own car made more sense than attempting to integrate Tesla into Apple. Way back in 2014, Musk said that he had "conversations" with Apple, but he said at the time that an acquisition seemed "very unlikely."

Apple was never able to find the right leader for the Apple Car project. As we detailed in a look back at the Apple Car's history earlier today, the project had four different leads and was scaled up and scaled back several times over the course of the last 10 years. According to The New York Times, the ultimate reason that it failed was because Apple was simply unable to develop the software and algorithms for a car with autonomous driving.

The more than 2,000 employees that worked on the car project are being redistributed, some will join other teams at Apple to work on AI and other technologies, and some will be laid off. Apple will take what it learned from the car project and apply it to other devices like AI-powered AirPods with cameras, robot assistants, and augmented reality.

More on the downfall of the Apple Car and some of the technologies that Apple came up with can be found in the full The New York Times report.

Popular Stories

iOS 18

Apple Says iOS 18.4 Will Be Released in April With These New Features

Wednesday February 26, 2025 7:15 am PST by
In a recent press release, Apple confirmed that iOS 18.4 will be released in April. From the Apple News+ Food announcement:Coming with iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 in April, Apple News+ subscribers will have access to Apple News+ Food, a new section that will feature tens of thousands of recipes — as well as stories about restaurants, healthy eating, kitchen essentials, and more — from the...
Generic iPhone 17 Feature With Full Width Dynamic Island

Latest iPhone 17 Series CAD Images in Line With Redesign Rumors

Friday February 28, 2025 2:51 am PST by
Apple is expected to embrace a new camera system design for some models in its upcoming iPhone 17 series, and the latest purported CAD images don't deviate from what we have been hearing lately about Apple's new lineup. If you do not like the sound of an iPhone with a Google Pixel-style camera bar, look away now. Seasoned leaker Sonny Dickson shared the following images in a post on X...
iphone 16e usb c feature

Apple Provides Reason for iPhone 16e's Lack of MagSafe

Friday February 28, 2025 4:39 am PST by
Apple has offered a reason why the iPhone 16e doesn't include MagSafe, one of the more notable omissions from its latest entry-level smartphone. According to Apple representatives who spoke to Daring Fireball's John Gruber, MagSafe is not included in the iPhone 16e because "most people in the iPhone 16e's target audience exclusively charge their phones by plugging them into a charging...
apple intelligence black

These New Apple Intelligence Features Are Coming in iOS 18.4

Friday February 28, 2025 3:17 pm PST by
iOS 18.4 was supposed to bring new Apple Intelligence Siri features, but Apple ended up needing to pull those capabilities from the update to continue testing. There are fewer new Apple Intelligence additions now, but there are still some new features that will make the update worth installing when it comes out in April. Priority Notifications Apple introduced Priority Notifications back at ...
Generic iOS 19 Feature Mock Light

iOS 19 Rumored to Include These New Features for Your iPhone

Saturday March 1, 2025 11:00 am PST by
iOS 19 is still around three months away from being unveiled, but there are plenty of rumors about the upcoming update. Below, we recap iOS 19 rumors so far. Redesigned Camera App A leak earlier this year allegedly revealed a redesigned Camera app coming with iOS 19. On his YouTube channel Front Page Tech in January, Jon Prosser shared a video showing what the new Camera app will...
cook trump

Trump Responds to Apple Keeping Diversity Policies

Wednesday February 26, 2025 6:32 am PST by
In an all-caps post on Truth Social today, U.S. President Donald Trump said Apple should fully end its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. Tim Cook meeting with President Trump in 2017 "APPLE SHOULD GET RID OF DEI RULES, NOT JUST MAKE ADJUSTMENTS TO THEM," he wrote. Trump's post comes one day after Apple held its annual shareholders meeting, during which a majority of...
apple watch ultra snow

6 Features Coming to the Apple Watch Ultra 3

Tuesday February 25, 2025 9:00 am PST by
The Apple Watch Ultra 3 is expected to launch later this year, arriving two years after the previous model with a series of improvements. While no noticeable design changes are expected for the third generation since the company tends to stick with the same Apple Watch design through three generations before changing it, there are a series of internal upgrades on the way. By the time the ...
airpods pro purple

Here's When AirPods Pro 3 Are Rumored to Launch

Monday February 24, 2025 9:14 am PST by
According to a post on X today from a leaker known as Kosutami, Apple plans to launch AirPods Pro 3 in May or June this year. The leaker also claimed that an AirTag 2 will launch around the same time. Kosutami is best known as a collector of prototype Apple hardware, but they have occasionally shared accurate information about Apple's future product plans. For example, they accurately...
apple c1

How Fast is Apple's First-Ever 5G Modem? The Results Are Surprising

Friday February 28, 2025 10:08 am PST by
iPhone 16e reviews are now out, and Apple's custom-designed C1 modem has been put to the test. The results so far are quite surprising, as the C1's speeds are not as slow compared to Qualcomm modems as originally expected. While the C1 does not support ultra-fast mmWave 5G in the U.S., it appears to offer comparable 5G performance to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X71 modem found in the iPhone 16,...

Top Rated Comments

Antoniosmalakia Avatar
13 months ago

Their yearly profit is about $100 Billion, so keep that in mind for comparison.
I knew my overpriced SSD upgrade was paying for something (nothing).
Score: 54 Votes (Like | Disagree)
jooish Avatar
13 months ago
Other than paychecks, I'd like to see what $10b and a decade of work amounted to.
Score: 30 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Eso Avatar
13 months ago
Their yearly profit is about $100 Billion, so keep that in mind for comparison.
Score: 29 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Avatar74 Avatar
13 months ago
iPhone sales flat. Car cancelled. AVP better knock it out of th--

Never mind.
Score: 27 Votes (Like | Disagree)
NT1440 Avatar
13 months ago
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Given the types of patents that have been a result of the initiative it seems like Project Titan at some point started functioning as a Basic R&D lab. Think Bell Labs or Palo Alto Research center.

Apple has been patenting some really cool stuff across a whole range of areas that while were dreamt up in the context of a car, can definitely apply to a whole host of different areas.

https://www.patentlyapple.com/autonomous-vehicle-technology/

Smart fabrics being just one area that comes to mind…
Score: 27 Votes (Like | Disagree)
sevoneone Avatar
13 months ago
Tim said: "Make me a car, or make me a new device with a starting price that is as much as a cheap used car."

This is where we are now.
Score: 21 Votes (Like | Disagree)