Why Apple killed its electric car

After spending over $10 billion, screwing over corporate partners, hiring and firing talent and a decade of work trying to develop a flagship product for a new, massive market, Apple has killed what could have been its most ambitious product yet: an electric car.

Its death comes with no announcement, for Apple never officially acknowledged ‘Project Titan’ existed, but Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reported last week that its 2,000-person team had been shifted to other projects. Its demise is surprising because Apple rarely gives up on big projects, and because of just how much time and money had been spent on it.

As Tripp Mickle— who reported in the project in his excellent book, After Steve — wrote in the New York Times, the project has been a total disaster for years, and employees knew it. Over time, they called it ‘the Titanic disaster’. The project started in 2014, when Google’s self-driving car prototypes appeared to be a big deal, self-driving tech looked like the near future and Apple had many incentives to jump into the pond.