Apple Car project is reportedly out of gas

Apple has cancelled its rumoured long-running plans to build a car, according to a new update from a reliable Apple reporter.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reckons Apple CEO Tim Cook dropped the news to the team of some 2,000 Project Titan staffers still working on the project on Tuesday.

We haven’t heard much about the viability of the project in the last 12 months or so, although Apple had never acknowledged publicly it was working on a car in the first place. There were enough eyewitness reports of people seeing it out and about on test drives to put that any doubts to bed.

Many of the staff who, according to the report, had remained on the project, will now be shifted to focus on Apple’s efforts to create a generative AI model to rival the likes of OpenAI and Google’s Gemini.

Tim Cook has previously stated that Apple will have more to say about its plans in the space before the year is out – and it may be as soon as WWDC in June.

“We’re excited to share the details of our ongoing work in that space later this year,” Cook said during an earnings call earlier this month.

The writing appeared to be on the wall for Apple Car when Apple began announcing a host of automotive initiatives that might have otherewise been reserved for its own car. The ability to use an iPhone as a car key, for example, and the recent plans to expand a CarPlay platform across an entire dashboard of the car.

Still, as Gurman put it, shutting down the Apple Car initiative would still represent Apple “abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the company.”

In the last couple of years it was reported Apple had relented on original plans to build the car without pedals or a steering wheel and making it fully self-driving.