What Killed the Apple Car?

Bloomberg Originals
Bloomberg Originals
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Published 2024-03-08
Project Titan, Apple’s secretive car program, has been canceled. The tech giant spent billions of dollars over the past decade as part of a grandiose plan to upturn the car industry in the same way the iPhone revolutionized mobile phones. There was an abortive effort to buy Tesla, a design inspired by the old Volkswagen bus and plans to team up with Mercedes-Benz, BMW and others.

But last month, Apple quietly abandoned the car project. Bloomberg News goes under the hood of Project Titan to reveal what the company was planning and explain why it ultimately fell apart.

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Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:09 What Tim Cook said about the car
02:32 Project Titan’s origins
05:00 Uber and Tesla change things
06:30 Self-driving car disappointments
08:16 Apple’s final rethink

#apple #evs #business

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All Comments (21)
  • @rafsanmahboob9634
    paying extra for your car's charging cable won't ever be a thing now
  • @bakerkawesa
    They realized they couldn't achieve the astronomical profit margins they're accustomed to.
  • @pji1979
    They had one look at Rivian's balance sheet and income statement. That was enough.
  • @edvorg
    Simple answer: The lightning charging port was banned in EU
  • @thibaultlibat368
    “Porsche, Audi, Lamborghini, you name it” So Volkswagen 😂
  • @kimwahchueng5291
    Prototype is easy, production is hard, profitability is even…..?
  • @oisinquinn9469
    Its a low margin business that takes like 15 years to produce profitably. Apple does high margin businesses.
  • @CityLifeinAmerica
    If people are gawking at the prices of the Vision Pro, ...imagine the price of the car.
  • @JiajuChen
    I think the weirdest situation for apple is that, to build an autonomous driving car, you really need a lot of data, and apple isn’t willing to sell the car without selfdriving capabilities first. Testing only with your own team really can’t match the real consumers testing.
  • @mitchellsmith4601
    Vision Pro will NEVER replace the iPhone. Any successful AR glasses will need to look like glasses do today, and we are still years away from that.
  • @marcusaurelius49
    It never ceases to amaze me the hubris of the techies to think that because they can build a phone or software, they can replicate their success in other industries just because they think they are so smart. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
  • @Warrantti
    Simple Answer: They refused put windows on it.
  • @shininio
    They failed at the first step of product development: Define what problem the product solves and to which segment of their market it is aimed
  • @fungiblefinance1027
    The problem was they just talked about it but never materialized anything. Too afraid to fall that they failed.
  • @enderan27
    2:46 "they hired the best people, from Porsche, Lamogini, Audi" All from VW Group ❤
  • @hydrohasspoken6227
    What am i missing here? Xiaomi has much less cash than Apple and started the car project much late. Is this a case of chasing perfection instead of focusing to finish the job at hand?
  • @zulucoyote2731
    One way to look at this project's failure is from the perspective of Simon Sinks "Start With Why." It seems to me that in this project Apple started with the product that they wanted to make (a car or "the what") instead of figuring out the problem they were trying to solve. This lead to the wide and changing focus of the project. Essentially, they were focused on creating a product that they already envisioned and not solving a problem or creating a solution. They started with 'we want to make an Apple car' and not 'how do we make the driving experience better for individuals.'
  • @andrewthomas695
    Like so much of the hype of the 2010s, it was just that. Hype.