Ten years, billions of dollars, multiple leadership changes, and dozens of rumors later, the Apple Car project is dead. A new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that Apple has officially canceled the car, breaking the news to nearly 2,000 employees who had been working on it on Tuesday. As part of the change, Apple will move "many employees working on the car" to the company's artificial intelligence division where they will focus on generative AI projects, which Apple is expected to share more about later this year, according to a statement by CEO Tim Cook on the company's earnings call earlier this month. But the car team also included hundreds of hardware engineers and car designers, some of who, Bloomberg reports, will be able to apply for jobs in other divisions of the company. The rest are likely to be laid off.

The road ahead looks bumpy for the Apple Car. A new report reveals that the effort, dubbed Project Titan and dating to 2014, has been plagued by a'revolving door of leaders,' time wasted on sleek demos and a lack of commitment to mass production from CEO Tim Cook. According to a report from The Information that's based on conversations with 20 company employees, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi is'particularly skeptical' of the project and has voiced his concerns to other senior executives at Apple. Cook - who'rarely visits' the project's offices in Santa Clara, California - has also been'unwilling to commit to mass projection of a vehicle,' the report says, which has frustrated other leaders at the firm. Apple Car has been plagued by management turnover, ever-shifting goals and a lack of full commitment from the company's top leaders, areport in The Information states.

While vague on the surface, an Apple white paper detailing the company's approach to self-driving cars reveals some additional insights into its approach to autonomous vehicle development. Publication of the report followed a February 2019 disclosure that revealed Apple's safety drivers to be taking control of experimental self-driving cars approximately one time for every mile driven. That sounds like a lot, but I rather suspect the truth is this is connected with Apple's different approach to artificial intelligence (AI) rather than any weakness in its systems. My opinion (based on Apple's general approach to AI, which is to deploy intelligence at the edge rather than in the cloud) is that the company hopes to build a truly autonomous vehicle intelligence. You don't want a car that know it should turn left now, you want a car that knows that and also knows why it should do so – a level of contextual intelligence that also makes the vehicle more autonomous.

Apple is reportedly still interested in its self-driving car venture, Project Titan, a recent report from a Swiss local site Inside IT via Apple Insider suggests. The company is said to quietly operating a research lab in Switzerland and has hired computer visions and robotics researchers, the site said. The facility could be linked to Apple's autonomous car project. At least 10 doctoral and postdoctoral students from ETH Zurich University have left the school for the research facility, the report said. "The specialists from the laboratories for computer vision and robotics are particularly in demand," Inside IT reported.