Apple’s project to build an autonomous vehicle, codenamed Project Titan, is being shuttered. After spending billions of dollars over more than a decade this may look like a colossal failure. But it’s likely that we have already seen the fruits of this project.
Project Titan was launched about a decade ago. By 2018, it’s reported that the project employed around 5000 people and produced a few dozen registered vehicles. For all intents and purposes, it seemed that Apple was serious about building a car.
I was never sure that was Apple’s ultimate goal. While Apple has a history of disrupting exisiting markets with its own take on what makes a great product, automotive never seemed like a good fit to me. While many Apple fanboys (fanpeople?) wanted to see Apple buy out Tesla, that never made sense to me culturally. Can you imagine the pragmatic Tim Cook and the enigmatic Elon Musk working in partnership?
Making cars is a very different endeavour to making electronics. And I suspect Apple has never really been totally committed to actually making a car. Comments Cook made to Bloomberg, later reported by 9to5Mac, seem to confirm this.
We’re focusing on autonomous systems, and clearly one purpose of autonomous systems is self-driving cars. There are others, and we sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects.
The fruit of Project Titan is already with us
Cook’s comments to Bloomberg, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, tell us a lot. When we consider what it takes to make a car that can be truly autonomous we can see that Apple has been creating the building blocks and then deploying them across its product portfolio.
Apple’s acquisitions of P. A Semi, Intrinsity, Passive Semiconductor and others led to the development of the A, M and S systems on a chip. All those gave Apple an edge in processing power and efficiency over rival products.
And while many other electric car makers use processors they purchase from third parties (Tesla, for example, uses AMD Ryzen chips after shipping from Intel), Apple developed its own silicon with on chip AI processing capability.
The camera technology used in the latest iPhone is no doubt shared or codeveloped with Project Titan. High quality image processing is table stakes for an autonomous vehicle. And Apple’s use of LiDAR for object detection has obvious applications in a car.
The new, gesture driven interface we first saw in the latest Apple Watch and then with the Vision Pro is another example of this co-development. Imagine driving a car where the interface was not just managed with buttons, wheels and levers. We may be many years away from this sort of thing but I expect Project Titan was thinking far beyond simply releasing a car.
Project Titan was born from Steve Jobs’ legacy
Steve Jobs once boasted that Apple was the world’s biggest start up. He talked about how the company was not arranged as traditional hierarchy but built on a foundation of collaboration.
So, even though Project Titan may not have been a shipping product, the fruit of the research and development was being shared with the broader Apple team and vice-versa. And this is Apple’s great advantage. Each team shares its work. In many organisations, different product teams are set up in fierce rivalry. I suspect this was one of the big lessons Jobs learned in history first stint as Apple’s leader when he had the Macintosh and Lisa teams work in opposition.
When the iPhone came to market, most people did not realise, until much later, that it was not the primary focus of Apple’s research and development efforts. The product that became the iPad was the starting point.
But the technology that was developed for the tablet was seen as a way to reimagine mobile phones.
There’s no doubt that the lessons Apple learned through Project Titan will make their way into exisiting products and new ones that have not seen light of day.
Jobs said, “You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy”. The ideas that stem from Apple’s work on autonomous vehicles will continue to live on.
Anthony is the founder of Australian Apple News. He is a long-time Apple user and former editor of Australian Macworld. He has contributed to many technology magazines and newspapers as well as appearing regularly on radio and occasionally on TV.