Apple gives up building cars! 2,000 people transferred to AI Li Xiang: Absolutely correct
When I woke up, Apple gave up building cars.
Early this morning, Bloomberg released the bombshell news that Apple has canceled all development plans for self-driving electric vehicles.
Apple announced the news in a brief meeting that lasted only 12 minutes and did not answer any questions.
In 12 minutes, the car-building project that lasted for 10 years ended, which is sad.
Since Apple’s “Titan” plan was exposed in 2014, many industry leaders have participated in it. Many corporate executives from Tesla, Rivian, General Motors, Ford, etc. have switched jobs to Apple.
But in the past 10 years, Apple has been half-hidden and has kept its Titan project secret. When the outside world learned about Apple’s car-making news, it was mostly executive changes, plan delays, and project reorganization…
Now that the dust has settled, Apple has given up directly and strategically, which is completely shameful.
However, after the news was released, Apple’s stock price rose slightly. Musk also forwarded the relevant post on Twitter, posting an emoticon of a salute and a cigarette. I don’t know if he was paying tribute or feeling helpless.
The CEO of Li Auto also issued a statement supporting Apple’s decision, saying that “choosing to focus on artificial intelligence is the absolutely right strategic choice and the time is right.”
Tens of billions of dollars invested in nothing
Abandoning car building will have the biggest impact on Apple’s 2,000-person car-making team, as well as hundreds of hardware engineers and vehicle designers.
These people were “surprised” when they heard the news. Next they will face two choices:
Transfer to the generative AI department, or be laid off.
“Many employees in the car-making project team will be transferred to the machine learning and AI departments and turned to generative artificial intelligence projects, which is also an increasingly important matter in the company’s schedule.” According to the report, Apple project executives told employees that hardware Engineers and vehicle designers will have the opportunity to apply for jobs in other project teams.
Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, and Kevin Lynch, vice president in charge of car building projects, announced the decision internally on Tuesday, local time.
Currently, employees of the Apple Automotive Team (Special Projects Group, or SPG for short) have begun to focus on promoting generative artificial intelligence projects, and the latter has gradually become Apple’s strategic focus.
The shift from cars to AI is, in a sense, an afterthought for Apple.
At present, the competition for new energy vehicles has become fierce. From the brutal growth in the early days, it has begun to become more rational, and a large number of start-up companies have fallen on the eve of the outbreak.
One fact is that the average selling price of new energy vehicles is higher than that of fuel vehicles, and the convenience is far from meeting people’s needs. More and more car companies have begun to turn to fuel vehicles or hybrid vehicles with higher profits. Ford and Toyota, for example, are lowering their expectations for pure electric vehicles.
The demand for new energy vehicles in the U.S. market has also begun to slow down. UBS predicts that the growth rate of U.S. electric vehicle sales will drop from 47% to 11% in 2024.
For Apple cars, Project Titan has been established in 2014, and Weilai, Xiaopeng or Ideal were also established at almost the same time. Now Weilai has begun to take shape, and even Xiaomi, which announced its car-making in 2021, this year It will also be launched and delivered. It seems that the Apple car got up early and rushed to the late market.
According to Bloomberg, the Apple car team is also facing pressure from senior management and the board of directors to launch products as soon as possible.
In the later stages of the project, Apple had planned to set the price of the car at US$100,000, but internal opinions were not unified. They were worried that it would weaken the consistently high profit margins of Apple products, which would be out of proportion to the large initial investment.
The car project has yet to come to fruition, and Apple’s performance is slightly inferior on the currently hot AI track.
Bloomberg reports that Apple is lagging behind in the field of artificial intelligence, which is a huge risk for a company that considers itself the biggest innovator in consumer technology.
In fact, as early as August last year, the famous Apple analyst Ming-Guo published an article saying that Apple “clearly lags behind its competitors” in terms of generative artificial intelligence.
Musk also intervened in Sora, the Vincent video software that became popular some time ago, saying that Tesla has the best Vincent video technology. In contrast, Apple has yet to announce its artificial intelligence strategy.
Facing this hot track, Apple has no reason to be absent.
Of course, cars aren’t the first project Apple has abandoned. Prior to this, Apple also gave up its TV production plan, but this time it gave up on making cars. It not only lasted for 10 years, but also burned tens of billions of dollars.
An expected failure?
With the subsequent layoffs and transfers of Apple’s car-making team, this project, which started in 2014 and once had as many as 5,000 people at its peak, has seen tens of billions of dollars invested go to waste. Apple’s dream of building a car that had been talked about for several years has been shattered. , it’s really broken now.
In fact, as early as a month ago, Apple Car had already bowed its head to reality. The smart driving level of this car has been reduced from L4 to L2+, and the target release date of electric vehicles has been postponed from 2026 at the earliest to 2028 at the earliest.
At that time, Apple executives were already “reconsidering the existence of Project Titan” and “either finalizing delivery or canceling the project entirely.”
This was the instruction given by Kevin Lynch, the head of Apple’s car-making project, and Tim Cook, the CEO, after a series of meetings.
Apple’s choice to discontinue Project Titan is unexpected, but it is not difficult to understand because the past ten years have been so bumpy.
Initially, Apple had great ambitions in building cars, preparing to create a car product that would subvert the industry. At that time, Apple and Magna collaborated to create an initial prototype that resembled a minivan. Apple had imagined how the vehicle could detect a driver’s heart attack and take them to the hospital.
However, these have not yet been realized. Apple turned to research autonomous driving. In order to facilitate testing, it directly spent a huge sum of 125 million US dollars to buy a test site. Not long after, Apple’s design team began to adjust the direction of car building to the implementation of real cars. .
In the past 10 years, Apple’s direction of building cars has continued to swing. There were disagreements within the top management about how to build a car from the beginning. From the driving experience, to the implementation of the actual car, to autonomous driving, they were constantly overthrown and started over.
What caused the strategic swing was the reorganization of the Titan project team from time to time. In the past few years, there have been frequent news of disbandment of the Titan team, and executives have been leaving and changing jobs.
In the ten years since it started building cars, Project Titan has had at least five people in charge. The succession of emperors and courtiers has also caused Apple’s car-building plans to change again and again.
The Apple car project was launched in 2014 under the leadership of former Ford engineer Steve Zadesky, who was responsible for the iPhone and iPod.
At that time, creating a fully self-driving car without a steering wheel became the main direction of Apple’s Titan Assist. Later, it was put in charge of former hardware department director Dan Riccio.
Later, Bob Mansfield, a retired former Apple executive, was “rehired” to build cars. Under his leadership, Apple’s focus in building cars began to shift toward autonomous driving software. Then he retired again and handed over the baton of Apple’s car manufacturing to Doug Field, the former Tesla senior vice president of engineering who led the mass production of Model 3. However, Doug Field preferred vehicle manufacturing, and the technical route changed accordingly.
But that’s not all. In September 2021, Doug Field resigned from Apple and went to Ford, and the car-making project was changed to Kevin Lynch, the head of Apple Watch, which once again brought Apple’s goal of building cars back to the autonomous driving software route.
The fundamental reason for the swing in the technical route is that Apple wants to build a “revolutionary” car too much. Apple’s intentions are too high when it comes to building a car, and the story frame of building a car is too grand.
But the automobile industry is not so easy to change. Even a company as strong as Apple with a huge cash reserve of more than 150 billion US dollars has to lose.
In other words, Apple’s jumping back and forth is itself a confusion about its business model. In other words, even Cook may not have figured out how Apple Car can make money.
Finally, let me tell you an interesting story. Musk had previously revealed that during Tesla’s most difficult period in 2018, he approached Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla, but was turned away by Apple. Unexpectedly, that time would be the closest Apple has ever come to building a car. (Musk: You didn’t seize the opportunity…)
