Despite spending billions of dollars on the project over the past 10 years, Apple has scrapped efforts to build its own autonomous electric car.
Social media users have mercilessly mocked the tech giant, which is reportedly laying off employees who worked on the ambitious plan.
At X, one joked that Apple canceled the car “after realizing it would require Windows,” in a nod to rival tech firm Microsoft’s software.
Another user said the “charging solution was a little awkward” with a shot of an upside-down car with a charger plugged in.
Yet another posted an image of the ‘original Apple car’, driven by Lowly Worm, the fictional worm from classic 1960s children’s books.
One X user said: “Apple has canceled its plans to make a car after realizing it would require Windows.”
‘Thank goodness we still have the original Apple car!’ One user posted a photo of Lowly Worm from Richard Scarry’s beloved children’s books.
Elon Musk, owner of rival company Tesla, also addressed the news about X with two emojis: one of a waving face and another of a lit cigarette.
Apple has not revealed how much it spent on the secret project, known internally as ‘Project Titan’, although CNBC It said it pumped in around $30bn (£23bn) last year alone.
MailOnline has contacted Apple for comment.
The company notified employees in an internal memo on Tuesday that the Apple car project would be ending, which largely came as a shock to the nearly 2,000 employees working on it.
Many employees from the team that had been developing the car will be moved to its artificial intelligence (AI) division.
However, not everyone will be saved and some layoffs will be inevitable. Bloomberg reported.
It comes just a month after the site reported that Apple would launch the car as soon as 2028, albeit with greatly reduced self-driving capabilities than originally planned, and not long after the company was still filing auto-related patents.
As for why it was cancelled, one expert says the landscape has changed in the 10 years since ‘Project Titan’ was launched, focusing more on AI than self-driving cars.
Another user joked that the “charging solution was a little awkward” with a shot of an overturned car with a phone charger plugged in.
Elon Musk, owner of rival company Tesla, also addressed the news on X with two emojis: a greeting face and a lit cigarette.
“On the one hand, this is a modest disappointment, as the internal view, with approximately 2,000 employees on this initiative, was that an Apple Car was still on the medium-term horizon,” said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush.
“But the focus within Apple is intensifying and executing a broad AI strategy within the Apple ecosystem, as it appears that the vast majority of these engineers and developers will now focus their efforts on AI.”
Company executives were reportedly concerned that with the $100,000 price target, profit margins would be precariously thin.
The tech company began working on a car in around 2014 and rumors have been furiously circulating since then about what it would look like.
Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that Apple was working on building a car in a brief interview with Bloomberg in 2017, although he said his company is “focusing on autonomous systems” rather than a physical vehicle.
“We kind of see it as the mother of all AI projects,” Cook said in the interview. “It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects to do.”
In 2015, Apple board member Mickey Drexler told Business Insider that Steve Jobs considered building a car before he died in 2011.
A 2022 Apple patent includes sketches of a passenger in the Apple Car. Chairs in the car would move to match the images, the patent suggested.
The Apple Car has been highly anticipated for years, so several design firms have already created artistic renderings of what it could look like.
Although its initial plans were to create a fully autonomous electric vehicle, it recently scaled it back to an electric vehicle with semi-autonomous features.
Reuters reported in 2020 that Apple was considering launching a vehicle in 2024 or 2025, but progress largely stalled when the Covid pandemic upended the global auto industry.
Apple didn’t even release promotional images of the vehicle, although several design firms created artistic renderings of what it might look like.
In 2022, Devanga Borah, a mechanical engineer at Tezpur University in India, revealed renderings of a strange white car consisting of a spherical capsule that rotates 360 degrees on four wheels.
Reminiscent of Apple’s 2002 eMac computer, the vehicle is painted in gloss white and features the Apple logo between the front and rear sets of wheels.
British car leasing company Vanarama also created images of a sleek gray vehicle with sharp angles and a bright Apple logo on the radiator grill.
Vanarama has created images of a sleek gray vehicle with sharp angles and a shiny Apple logo on the radiator grill.
As envisioned by Vanarama artists, the vehicle’s sleek interior sports a large, customizable touchscreen interface in place of a conventional dashboard.
In 2016, ConceptsiPhone created a video of a possible Apple Car prototype, featuring a large in-dash screen, connectivity to other Apple devices, and the company’s signature minimalist design.
Hussein Dia, future professor of urban mobility at Swinburne University, said the news shows that creating autonomous vehicles is a much more difficult challenge than even the biggest technology companies had estimated.
“We will need substantial progress in artificial intelligence to get to level five (automation),” he told AAP.
“The industry is showing that it is not as easy as they thought.”
Level five of automation would represent fully autonomous driving in a vehicle, Professor Dia said, while the most advanced Tesla vehicles currently feature level two of automation.