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Apple Spent More Than $10 Billion on Apple Car Before Canceling Project
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As a shareholder I’d like to say: “Thank you Tim Cook.”
Where were the board of directors?
Where were the board of directors?
With the near perfection that they've achieved in the Vision space, such as eye tracking and object recognition, if Apple can successfully apply that to their car software, it will be amazing! I hope they don't give up on the car space entirely.
Instead of trying to create a startup car company with the hundreds of billions in tooling and labor costs, here's an idea:
How about getting existing carmakers to integrate iOS into the entire auto's OS? You know, "turn on the windshield wipers," "turn down the seat heater," "zero out trip odometer," "change drive mode to 'performance'," Turn the A/C up to maximum." "Unlock the Doors, start the car and roll down the windows." (from the house)."
That's right in Apple's set of core competencies, and a way to leverage all that R&D for maximum profit, and return to shareholders. And it's something Jobs would tell you is "insanely great!"
How about getting existing carmakers to integrate iOS into the entire auto's OS? You know, "turn on the windshield wipers," "turn down the seat heater," "zero out trip odometer," "change drive mode to 'performance'," Turn the A/C up to maximum." "Unlock the Doors, start the car and roll down the windows." (from the house)."
That's right in Apple's set of core competencies, and a way to leverage all that R&D for maximum profit, and return to shareholders. And it's something Jobs would tell you is "insanely great!"
As a shareholder I'd like to also thank Tim Cook. Since he took over in August 2011, Apple has recorded a 700% increase in market capitalization, even at today's close, and increased dividends at least twice a year. You have no complaint.
You're probably right that infrastructure is part of the problem. If roadways and highways can become "smart", with sensors and emitters at strategic locations, then smart cars can get a better sense of where they are in that space. The technology can be something similar to Bluetooth beacons installed on lamp posts. They don't need to be connected to any networks, just a signal, effectively creating a local GPS network at the road level. But the road to that realization is long and windy! Just look at home automation as an example of how slowly the tech evolves.
Yes to all that. Tired of looking at my watch and it says unread messages that I opened a week ago or deleting a spam text on my phone and it’s still there on my Mac.
Or universal notifications.
Or this. Or that.
They spread themself too thin and don’t work on fundamentals.
I'm sorry, but this seems to be only a you issue. I love how flawless iMessage works across my devices, including the older ones. There's also something wrong with your Apple Watch since my AW5 doesn't do that. Then again, that sounds like user error. Walking is very light on the heart, meaning it takes quite a bit for a device to recognize you're "working out". Suggestion: start a workout. Also, try actually working out: running, lifting weights, biking, swimming, etc.
Eh. That's like half a year of what Alphabet pays Apple to make Google the default search engine.
$10 Billion is a lot to throw away on a project that was considered by many to be doomed from the start.
Maybe all of that talent could been put to better use if Tim and company would have stayed in their lanes and innovated on something related to their expertise.
The most telling words from the NYT article: “The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011.”
So, as a shareholder I think do have something to complain about. Tim Cook is a weak leader regardless of the financial engineering and overall market exuberance that has has caused all of the FANG stocks to grow during his tenure.
Oh well, maybe the Vision Pro will be that product. 😂
BYD is profitable. They outsold Tesla last year (again) and are expanding sales beyond China.
Surpassing Tesla, China’s BYD Will Take On the World in 2024
Having weathered domestic competition, international expansion is the car maker’s next priority.
www.wsj.com
Yes, I believe whatever resources they put into this will pay dividends in the future. All of their products and technologies in those products seem complimentary, so we’ll see the efforts in other products. CarPlay will most certainly benefit, and will probably see greater adoption. Maybe offering other services in the future, and possibly licensing battery tech that they developed.
They should put these resources to further develop and advance the Vision Pro.
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.
Article Link: Apple Spent More Than $10 Billion on Apple Car Before Canceling Project
And even CarPlay is going to take a downward turn here. Manufacturers are dying to replace it with their own systems. They're just buying time until consumers are not so hostile to the idea of CarPlay/AndroidAuto not being there anymore.
With projects like this I'm sure they developed a lot of patentable technology that they could move forward into other areas and license. Licensing and subscription of certain technologies could possibly make them a lot more money than actually building something so there's that.
One word: battery.
China has a chokehold on everything that has to do with the battery that EVs run on. Most carmakers realize they just can't beat the Chinese when it comes to costs.
This is also one major reason Toyota and Honda have resisted pure EVs for so long and opted for hybrids instead.
The straw that broke the camel's back in this case might be the de-risking from China that's all the rage at the moment. Without Chinese expertise in battery manufacturing, there is no way Apple will make a fully autonomous EV with the kind of profit margin they deem acceptable.
All this reporting on internal disagreement at Apple might just be a smokescreen.
The title should be "10 Billion of Apple Customer's Money Was Wasted on the Apple Car" 
.
.
Tim Cook's punishment was getting his salary cut to $63.2 million in 2023 from the $99.4 million he got in 2022.
It doesn't work that way. General-purpose AI doesn't really exist right now. ChatGPT gets... like 10% of the way there but it's more for language processing so it's still very specific.
All current AI models have to be specific because that's the only way they can come to market in a reasonable amount of time after being fed a reasonable amount of data.
And I can bet my current job whatever "AI" they planned for Project Titan was fed nothing but data on how to drive a car or how to steer one, so it's pretty much useless in any other application Apple can think of.
So having said that, I think this $10B loss from Apple is basically just a "welp, that did not work" type of writeoff. The project only has some skilled engineers left to offer other divisions. Otherwise most folks who were on the project with domain specific skills have to be let go.
Fun fact: I do know someone who was on the project and now they're basically being told "stand by and wait for instructions, do not do anything" so that's how bad it is now.
who needs a car or 10 billion dollars? maybe the most important thing those teams were developing for a decade…………… was friendship :’)
The latest French car maker Renault has launched a new electric car, the R5 with a total development investment of 2B. Might not be as good as an Apple car but this one like many more will be out
Further understanding of science and technology. That's what it amounted to.
Unfortunately most people don't care about the long term future. How much did we spend on the space program? Did it do anything for us? Yes.
R&D is what every company does to succeed, but you learn a lot when you fail. Everything doesn't work the first time you try it. I've never forgotten the first time I coded a controller for a robotic arm. Let's just say I learned a lot as I ducked to avoid metal flying past me.
R&D is an investment regardless if it eventuates in a product. People need to stop saying that "$10bn was wasted"
Wow, this was an article with an agenda…. “Flounder”? Members of the team knew? Couldn’t find the right leader?
No company has been able to develop autonomous driving. I remember in 2014 there was near consensus among the pundit class that all cars would be autonomous by 2020, there’s plenty of threads here mocking any naysayers, and we still live in a world where none are. Was it wrong for a massive tech hardware company to make an R&D bet on one of the major trends of the time? I don’t think so. Just like it wasn’t wrong to keep an OS X build going for Intel processors or to research folding phones.
The problem wasn’t an inability to find the right leader. No leader would have solved autonomous driving.
One mistake was not rooting out the employees who expected to fail and firing them. If you’re going to work each day on a project you’re calling a Titanic Disaster, then you’re just punching a clock and taking a paycheck— you’re not contributing. If you were competent, you’d have jumped ship for a job you expect to be successful at.
Apple pulls in close to $400B a year, had $155B in cash at the start, and people are sweating a moonshot that cost $10B over a decade…
No company has been able to develop autonomous driving. I remember in 2014 there was near consensus among the pundit class that all cars would be autonomous by 2020, there’s plenty of threads here mocking any naysayers, and we still live in a world where none are. Was it wrong for a massive tech hardware company to make an R&D bet on one of the major trends of the time? I don’t think so. Just like it wasn’t wrong to keep an OS X build going for Intel processors or to research folding phones.
The problem wasn’t an inability to find the right leader. No leader would have solved autonomous driving.
One mistake was not rooting out the employees who expected to fail and firing them. If you’re going to work each day on a project you’re calling a Titanic Disaster, then you’re just punching a clock and taking a paycheck— you’re not contributing. If you were competent, you’d have jumped ship for a job you expect to be successful at.
Apple pulls in close to $400B a year, had $155B in cash at the start, and people are sweating a moonshot that cost $10B over a decade…