Apple is proceeding with self-driving car technology and is looking to 2024 to produce a passenger vehicle that may include its own battery technology.
The iPhone manufacturer’s automotive efforts, christened Project Titan, have advanced clumsily since 2014 when it first began to design its own automobile. Apple slowed down the push to concentrate on software and reviewed its goal at a point in time.
Doug Field, an Apple veteran who is a former employee of Tesla, came back to manage the project in 2018 and retrenched 190 people from the team last year.
Apple has since then recorded sufficient progress so that it now aspires to produce a vehicle for consumers, according to two sources privy to the matter. The firm’s wish of building a personal vehicle for the mass market is out of tune with rivals like Alphabet’s Waymo, which has produced robo-taxis to transport passengers for a driverless ride-hailing service.
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At the crux of Apple’s strategy is a new battery technology that could “radically” cut the cost of batteries and up the vehicle’s range.
Manufacturing a vehicle implies a supply chain snag even for Apple, a firm with a fortune that produces hundreds of millions of electronic products every year with parts from around the globe but has never produced a car.
Elon Musk’s Tesla spent 17 years before it could produce sustained profit-making cars.
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“If there is one company on the planet that has the resources to do that, it’s probably Apple. But at the same time, it’s not a cellphone,” a person who worked on Project Titan said.
Who will assemble an Apple-branded car remains vague but sources believe Apple will bank on a manufacturing partner to build cars.
It is probable that the tech company will choose to narrow the scope of its efforts to an independent driving system that would be integrated with a vehicle manufactured by a traditional automaker.
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