By Dan Moren
February 28, 2024 12:42 PM PT
The Back Page: The Apple Car does not remain a product in our lineup
Dear team,
In these difficult times, hard decisions sometimes have to be made. Not by anybody specifically, you understand—just in general. That’s why we are shutting down the Special Projects Group and its effort to develop autonomous driving systems. After more than a decade of work of thousands of people, with several billion dollars spent, the Apple Car is driving off into the sunset via a convoluted route that may or may not involve collisions with cyclists.
This decision was not taken lightly. At Apple we pride ourselves on creating products that surprise and delight our customers, but there was some concern that the car’s tendency to ignore stop signs and lane markers was perhaps putting too much emphasis on the “surprise” part of that equation.
In times like this, we’d like to follow the example of a true Apple icon, Project Titan’s namesake, the world’s former tallest dog, may he rest in peace. While our project, like Titan, was only in this world a relatively short time, we’d like to believe it made an outsized impact on the many lives it touched.
It is, we all agree, a shame that our reinvention of the automobile will never reach the consumer market of people who could afford $100,000 cars, which had a not insignificant overlap with the consumer market of people who could afford a $3,500 device for watching movies by themselves while on the moon. But despite this, we continue to persevere in related areas, including both our upcoming launch of partner vehicles featuring the next-generation of CarPlay 2 as well as our busy schedule of uproarious laughter at GM’s Ultifi system.
Many of you are surely wondering about your futures. Rest easy: those with relevant skills are being reassigned to our teams working on generative artificial intelligence, a technology that can also create a car, but in far less time and with square wheels. This work is of the utmost significance to Apple’s strategic goals and we believe it is just as important to the future of humanity as self-driving cars, except instead of removing people from making risky decisions while in a fast-moving vehicle constructed from several tons of glass and steel we are removing people from making risky decisions that produce staggering works of art and creativity. We can all agree that the key detail is “taking humans out of the equation.” In the end, Project Titan simply was not proving efficient enough at this on the timescale required.
We can’t overstate how important AI is and how pleased we are that you will all be contributing to its integration through Apple’s product lines. There is nothing more critical to our company than the success of this venture. Though our automotive endeavor may be at an end, we are still committed to delivering a product that will move all of us forward.
Do you see what we did there? Move forward?
Anyway. We look forward to working with you in your new capacity, bringing this important work to fruition and ensuring that humans can be eliminated in the most effective means possible.
Sincerely,
Apple Generative AI
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]