At the end of February 2024, Apple finally shut down its ambitious Project Titan car after nearly a decade. The New York Times published a detailed timeline of the project, such as spending $10 billion and meeting with a few car brands such as Tesla, Ford and even McLaren. In this news, Mark Gurman from Bloomberg shared more about other potential partners and other details during the journey.
A potential partnership with Mercedes-Benz
According to Gurman, Apple also had a negotiation with Mercedes-Benz and they were almost close to working together. Among all the potential partners, it seems that Apple and Mercedes-Benz were in discussions for months to the point of working on an electric vehicle (EV) together. It was initially agreed that Mercedes would help build the Apple Car, as well as wanting Apple's self-driving platform in its own cars.
As we reported before, Apple thought the Project Titan team was better off building a car from the ground up. So the company withdrew its partnership further since the executives were confident after working with Mercedes for months. It could have been Apple's only chance to make the Apple Car a reality.
How the Apple Car looked like
Next, here are some deets on what the Apple Car looked like. Gurman said there was one prototype that looked like a white minivan. It has “rounded sides, an all-glass roof, sliding doors and whitewall tyres", as well as a giant screen, reclining seats and a strong audio system. The executives wanted a Level 5 autonomous driving system, which could drive itself without a steering wheel or pedals. Manually, the EV could be controlled from a “video-game-style controller or iPhone app”.
Doug Field, who was the head of Project Titan warned the executives about the difficulty and challenges. He suggested scaling back to Level 3 which was using the normal way of a human driver to be in control. The executives still insisted but there was not much progress. Last year, the team were testing a Level 2 autonomous car which mirrors Tesla's Autopilot. That didn't go through as it would make the Apple Car the same as other EVs in the market.
Lack of direction over the years
There seems to be a lack of direction for Project Titan as well. Bob Mansfield, the man who often worked on Apple's hardware team was convinced by Dan Riccio to get on board. Then for some reason, he was working on the autonomous driving system instead of the EV prototype. Initially, Mansfield and Cook agreed to build a self-driving shuttle with Volkswagen. This was to be used by Apple employees on Apple Campus but it got shut down because it was a distraction.
From 2016 to 2018, Apple laid off 120 people from the project. With the lack of direction and engineers leaving Apple to other companies, executives were not happy with Cook's indecisiveness. There were many leadership changes over the years but never went anywhere.
Speaking of self-driving, Apple had a fleet of Lexus SUVs customised with the technology for testing. The executives also wanted to license the autonomous driving system to other car brands as a subscription service but it never came to fruition.
The original idea came from the late Steve Jobs
Another thing that Gurman revealed was Project Titan was an idea by former Apple co-founder Steve Jobs before his passing. It was during the 2008 financial crisis when most American car companies were failing. Steve Jobs also had an idea of acquiring General Motors Co. "for pennies on the dollar". However, that didn't happen as Apple was focusing on the iPhone and Steve Jobs thought it wasn't the right time.
Apple's vision for the self-driving car without a steering wheel or pedals definitely proved to be too ambitious. Perhaps over the years, it was never the right time and we may need to wait for another decade for this technology to mature. Until then, we just have to wait and see.
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