Apple's car manufacturing project has gradually disappeared, and now it's even giving up on autonomous driving.

Recently, according to foreign media MacRumors, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has canceled the company's autonomous vehicle testing permit on September 27.

It's worth noting that the report specifically mentions that Apple initiated the request to cancel the testing permit. If Apple had not requested it, the permit would have remained valid until April of next year.

The fact that Apple couldn't even wait six months further suggests that its "car manufacturing" project is wrapping up and will soon come to a complete end.

This outcome was not difficult to predict. At the end of February this year, it was reported that Apple internally announced the cancellation of the Apple Car project, with some employees transitioning to the generative AI team.

The car manufacturing project lasted for 10 years, with a cumulative investment of billions of dollars, yet it ultimately failed.

Why did Apple's car manufacturing project end so miserably?

01 Apple's Car Manufacturing Journey Ends in Compromise

According to public records, Apple obtained an autonomous vehicle testing permit from the California DMV in 2017 and established an autonomous driving fleet in California to conduct technical testing and validation for its Apple Car autonomous driving system.

By 2023, the number of registered vehicles in its autonomous driving fleet had increased to over 60. According to the DMV's 2023 autonomous driving report, over 50 of these vehicles were tested on roads, generating data with a test mileage exceeding 720,000 kilometers.

If there were no unforeseen circumstances, this testing permit would not have expired until April 30 of next year. However, according to MacRumors, on September 25 of this year, Apple applied to the California DMV to revoke the permit, and the decision was officially approved on September 27.

Alphabetically, Apple does not appear on the list

We reviewed the relevant information from the California DMV and confirmed that Apple has indeed disappeared from the testing list.

The fact that Apple proactively applied to revoke the testing permit indicates that the decision to cancel the Apple Car project, which was announced internally in February, is currently being orderly concluded, with virtually no chance of reversing the outcome.

From Titan to Apple Car, Apple's car manufacturing project has ultimately come to an end.

Looking back at Apple's car manufacturing history, it is a story of continuous compromise until it reached zero.

In 2014, Apple secretly launched an autonomous driving project, the precursor to its well-known car manufacturing project - the "Titan Project." Reports at the time indicated that over 1,000 automotive experts and engineers at Apple were secretly developing an electric vehicle with limited autonomous driving capabilities near the company's headquarters, extending their research and development in the automotive industry from software to hardware.

At this time, Apple's focus on "car manufacturing" was primarily on software, as evidenced by its letter to the US Department of Transportation: focusing on the development of autonomous driving software technology rather than manufacturing complete vehicles like Tesla.

This direction changed around 2018.

Apple autonomous driving test vehicle

As mentioned earlier, Apple obtained an autonomous vehicle testing permit from the California DMV in 2017. However, despite three years of development by a team of over a thousand people, its autonomous driving technology remained at the demonstration stage, unable to expand its capabilities and achieve commercialization.

In 2018, the Titan project was taken over by Doug Field, former Apple Mac hardware engineering vice president, who also had a background as a senior executive at automakers such as Ford and Tesla.

Field's appointment signaled that Apple's car manufacturing efforts were shifting from software to the design of complete vehicles in a true sense.

Apple autonomous driving concept car

At that time, Apple set an ambitious goal: to design a vehicle with L5 autonomous driving capabilities. This goal was considered very radical and exciting at the time.

After all, the company that designed the iPhone deserved such high aspirations, and the outside world was eagerly awaiting another miracle from Apple in the automotive field.

During this period, Apple attached great importance to this project and maintained high investment. Shortly after iPhone sales unexpectedly plummeted in the fourth quarter of that year, mainly due to challenges in its primary revenue source, the company acquired the autonomous driving startup Drive.ai and brought on some of its engineers.

During this time, according to Elon Musk, he had contacted Apple to discuss the possibility of acquiring Tesla, but Apple believed that building its own cars was more meaningful than acquiring and integrating an automaker.

This shows the high expectations Apple had for its car manufacturing business. During this period, the car manufacturing project entered a stable phase with consistent investment, research and development, but no mass production.

With no signs of mass production, Doug Field announced his resignation in September 2021, and the car manufacturing project underwent a leadership change, with Kevin Lynch, head of Apple Watch, taking over.

Kevin Lynch, head of Apple's car manufacturing project

This new leader set a deadline for the car manufacturing project: to launch a fully autonomous vehicle by 2025.

However, as the industry's understanding of autonomous driving deepened, timelines for the commercialization of fully autonomous driving began to shift, and Apple recognized this issue.

By the end of 2022, Bloomberg cited insiders as saying that Apple had pushed back the launch of its first new vehicle by a year to 2026 and abandoned the L5 fully autonomous driving route, compromising by only supporting fully autonomous driving capabilities on highways. The price of each vehicle was also adjusted from over $120,000 to less than $100,000.

The compromises didn't stop there. Soon after, in January 2024, Apple again adjusted its car manufacturing direction, not only downgrading the vehicle's autonomous driving level from L4 to L2+, but also pushing back the final launch date from 2026 to 2028, four years later.

Internally at Apple, this compromise marked its last effort, with Kevin Lynch and Apple CEO Tim Cook giving the directive after a series of meetings: "Either complete the delivery or cancel the project entirely."

However, by this time, the competitive landscape in the smart car industry had already changed significantly from before. An L2+ smart car launching in 2028 would inevitably face the fate of being outdated upon mass production.

Is it still necessary for Apple to manufacture cars?

No one expected an answer to this question just a month later:

The car manufacturing project was officially terminated. Some employees will be transferred to the machine learning and AI departments to work on generative AI projects, which are now more prioritized internally at Apple. Hundreds of hardware and automotive engineers will have the opportunity to apply for positions in other project teams, and layoffs may also occur.

02 Why Did Apple's Decade-Long Car Manufacturing Dream End in Disaster?

In summary, the failure of Apple's car manufacturing project seems destined from the start.

Firstly, when the Titan project was first established, the core team did not reach a consensus on how Apple should manufacture cars, leading to significant executive turmoil.

Steve Zadesky, one of the core members of the Titan project

Public information shows that four key leaders of the Titan project had differing opinions. Steve Zadesky favored complete vehicle development with semi-autonomous driving capabilities, aiming to compete with Tesla. In contrast, John Wright focused on software, aiming to disrupt the automotive product form by creating fully autonomous vehicles without steering wheels.

With its "disruptive" DNA, Apple chose to develop high-level autonomous driving software. Zadesky left the project in 2015, and Apple executive Bob Mansfield took over, implementing a software-focused strategy.

Subsequent changes in direction (and compromises on products) led to frequent leadership changes. Over the course of a decade, the project had four different leaders, with an average tenure of two and a half years for each.

Two and a half years is obviously too short to develop a mature automotive product, especially when each new leader often negated parts or all of the previous direction, making it difficult to maintain continuity in development efforts.

This constant overturning meant that Apple remained stuck in the early stages of car manufacturing, with significant investments yielding slow progress.

Secondly, Apple was overly optimistic about its goals. In the early 2010s, the global autonomous driving trend was just emerging. The industry was focused on storytelling and listening to stories, and Apple's initial goal of developing L5 autonomous driving capabilities and disrupting the automotive form factor was indeed ambitious.

This goal remains unfulfilled in the industry to this day, and even Elon Musk can only provide an uncertain timeline of 2027.

Cybercab, recently unveiled by Musk, is expected to launch in 2027

Even for Apple, which has created miracles before, replicating another one in an unfamiliar field would be challenging. During the testing of its autonomous driving system, Apple encountered multiple accident issues.

These are internal issues for Apple, but looking at the external environment, the failure rate for developing and mass-producing smart cars in the US is quite high.

Currently, aside from Tesla, most of the new US automakers, including Lucid and Rivian, have yet to achieve large-scale mass production capabilities, with some, like Fisker, facing bankruptcy.

A significant reason for this is that post-industrialization, the US faces challenges beyond just labor costs. A more significant problem is that it has struggled to establish a complete, mature, and low-cost industrial chain for new industries.

On the other hand, this is a significant reason for the rapid development of the domestic electric smart car industry in recent years, with Tesla playing a pivotal role and reaping significant benefits.

However, at this point, Apple's vision of a closed ecosystem extending from mobile devices to autonomous driving and vehicles is unlikely to be realized.

That's okay, though. Apple provided the blueprint, and domestic players will take it from here.

03 Apple Sets the Vision, Domestic Players Deliver

Autonomous driving combined with complete vehicle development was the core of Apple's fluctuating car manufacturing plans. In addition, Apple's well-established closed ecosystem based on iOS also attracted significant attention.

This includes the ability of iOS to empower smart cockpits, which, as discussed extensively in the past, has provided boundless imagination for the final form of Apple's mass-produced vehicles.

CarPlay functionality

Before officially entering the car manufacturing arena, Apple launched the "iOS in the car" program in 2013, later renamed CarPlay, entering the smart car market.

Similar products like Baidu CarLife, Huawei HiCar, Tencent AutoLink, and AliOS followed in Apple's footsteps.

After its launch, CarPlay dominated the in-vehicle system market, with over 80% of new cars sold globally in 2020 supporting CarPlay, according to Apple. According to Haitong International data, as of the end of 2021, CarPlay had partnered with over 70 automakers on 720 models.

Apple continues to upgrade CarPlay to better integrate with vehicle control and entertainment systems.

The popularity of this in-vehicle smart system stems largely from its ability to interconnect mobile devices and vehicle terminals, elevating the ecosystem of the vehicle terminal to a new level.

The potential of a closed ecosystem connection between iOS and vehicle terminals is immeasurable.

This vision has ultimately been realized by domestic players, specifically through Huawei's HarmonyOS, Geely's Flyme Auto, and the up-and-coming Xiaomi Automobile.

The three platforms share similar approaches to realizing a closed ecosystem, primarily by connecting vehicle control terminals with mobile devices (and other mobile terminals) and enabling interoperability between ecological applications, with vehicle/mobile computing power and sensors being mutually invoked.

Through this ecosystem connection, various imaginative atomic service capabilities can be combined.

In the end, while Apple did not disrupt the industry, the legacy of the previous generation left imagination and mysteries for the next era, making it a worthy stepping stone for the industry as a whole.