People familiar with the matter said Apple disclosed the news internally on Tuesday, surprising the nearly 2,000 employees involved in the project.
According to people familiar with the matter, Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, the vice president in charge of the effort, jointly made the decision. The two executives told employees that the program will begin to taper off, with many employees working on automotive research and development being redirected to the artificial intelligence department. Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly important priority for the company. There are also hundreds of hardware engineers and automotive designers on Apple’s automotive team, and they are likely to apply for jobs on other Apple teams as well.
The company will be laying off employees, but it’s unclear how many.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk also took to social media site X to address Apple’s decision, posting a post complete with a tribute emoji and a cigarette.
Sawyer Merritt, an electric vehicle analyst, commented, “Apple spent 10 years trying to build an electric car with $162 billion in cash reserves, but ultimately came to the conclusion that it would be too hard and too small a profit – even with pricing of 100,000 dollars. Initially, Apple wanted it to be a fully self-driving car, but they didn’t have the fleet, the real-world data, or the experience to make that happen. There are only two major U.S. automakers that have never gone bankrupt: Tesla and Ford.
Musk replied below, “The natural state of a car company is death.”