For the millions of devoted Apple fans out there, sorry, you won’t be able to connect your iPhone into an electric iCar.
That’s because Apple has reportedly scrapped its 10-year-old effort to create its own electric vehicle, per Bloomberg.
The publication says the electronics giant’s Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, vice president of the EV project code-named Titan, just surprised some 2,000 employees in that division to inform them the plug was being pulled.
Some of its employees will be reassigned to Apple’s generative AI projects, and some laid off, the article explains.
Billions had been spent on Project Titan, which was aimed at creating an electric car that would have reportedly cost $100,000. But with the EV market cooling fast and some automakers shifting back to traditional vehicles because of it, Apple hit the brakes.
Incidentally, Elon Musk, who created the electric vehicle company Tesla, reacted to the news on his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, with a “saluting” emoji and one of a lit cigarette.
Business Insider called back Musk’s 2015 comments to the German newspaper Handelsblatt in which he expressed he wasn’t threatened by Apple’s foray into the EV market. “You can’t just go to a supplier like [iPhone builder] Foxconn and say: ‘Build me a car,'” he explained.
He also threw another elbow in that same interview, which may serve as a warning against now-former Project Titan workers sending a resume Tesla’s way. “If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I’m not kidding,” said Musk, who called Apple the “graveyard” for former Tesla workers.