Ángel Jiménez from Luis USA

USA

Updated Tuesday, February 27, 2024-21:57

It was an open secret.

Although none of its executives had officially confirmed it,

Apple

had been working for years on the design of an

electric and autonomous car

.

The project was known internally as

Project Titan

and nearly 2,000 company employees were dedicated to it.

The vehicle will ultimately never roll on roads.

Bloomberg confirmed today that Apple has definitively canceled the project.

Jeff Williams

, the company's chief operating officer, has communicated this to the team in charge of its development, which operated under the direction of

Kevin Lynch,

vice president of technology.

Many of the engineers will now go on to work on the team that is developing artificial intelligence applications within the company.

A portion of the employees will be laid off, but

Apple

hopes to find positions within other divisions for the majority.

Apple has invested billions of dollars in the project, which began filming in 2014, three years after the death of

Steve Jobs.

Although he never openly acknowledged its existence, the job offers published by the company revealed his ambitions in the automotive world.

At first, the company's goal was to build a completely autonomous vehicle, but after several years pursuing this goal, the company encountered several obstacles that were difficult to overcome.

The truth is that despite the optimism in the automobile industry, none of the efforts to create fully autonomous vehicles that emerged in the middle of the last decade seem to have worked.

There are pilot experiences in some cities around the world, but they still have serious limitations.

In

2020 Apple

made the decision to explore an alternative strategy: launch an electric car with advanced assisted driving functions, but more in line with vehicles from companies such as

Tesla, Rivian or Lucid

.

The car would have competed directly with the most advanced models of these companies, with a high price but with the incentive of being perfectly integrated into Apple's platforms and services, especially the iPhone.

To lead the team in this new, more modest approach, the company chose

Kevin Lynch

, until then responsible for the Apple Watch.

During the last three years the company has studied different

ways to build and market this vehicle, but a few days ago, the management leadership made the decision to completely stop the project after failing to achieve some of the internal goals that had been imposed.