In its first layoffs since the pandemic, Apple will reportedly lay off 614 employees after halting a decade-long effort to develop self-driving electric cars.
The Cupertino, California-based iPhone maker notified employees of the layoffs on March 28, and the changes were announced on May 27, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing state records. It is scheduled to take effect.
It wasn’t immediately clear which roles would be affected, but the move comes about a month after Apple abandoned its EV ambitions in favor of focusing more on artificial intelligence. .
At the time of the announcement in late February, Apple executives told the roughly 2,000 people working on the self-driving high-tech car that the company was cutting back on the team working on the car, known internally as the Special Projects Group (SPG). .
It’s unclear whether any former SPG employees were based in any of Apple’s eight offices in Santa Clara, Calif., where Barron’s reported that layoffs were occurring.
Some SPG employees have reportedly moved into AI roles under John Gianandrea, the executive who leads machine learning and AI strategy at Apple. The company has struggled to keep up with competition from rivals like Google and Microsoft, which has a $10 billion, multi-year deal with ChatGPT. The manufacturer is OpenAI.
The remaining hundreds of employees at SPG, many of them hardware engineers and automotive designers, will either apply for other jobs within Apple or be fired, the company announced in February.
But CEO Tick Cook insisted last year that the company’s job cuts were a last resort at a time of slumping employment and cost-cutting, the newspaper reported.
Apple representatives did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
If there are indeed layoffs among self-propelled artillery employees, then Project Titan, which began in 2014 with the aim of developing fully self-driving cars with luxurious interiors and voice-guided navigation, will This marks the end of a 10-year effort called .
Apple’s electric car sought to differentiate itself from rivals Tesla and Google’s Waymo with fully self-driving capabilities and a limousine-like interior designed for hands-off driving with no steering wheel or pedals.
But Project Titan struggled almost from the beginning.
During a test drive around Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters in 2022, the roads became difficult to navigate, with cars frequently hitting curbs and veering out of their lanes into the middle of intersections. In one accident, he almost hit a jogger.
A revolving door of departing executives also plagued the program.
Other hiccups along the way curtailed ambitious plans, including adding a steering wheel and pedals, and the launch was pushed back from 2025 to 2026, although it’s still expected to sell for $100,000. It had been.
Now, Apple fans may never see an EV coming from the tech giant.
However, despite increasing international competition in this field, demand is declining in the United States.
Michigan-based Ford, for example, said Thursday it was postponing plans to launch a three-row electric vehicle in Canada and a next-generation electric pickup truck in Tennessee, citing slowing demand.
Meanwhile, Japanese rival Nissan Motor Co. last week announced plans for 30 new cars by 2026, 16 of which will be electric.
Nissan said only seven of its new models were reserved in the U.S. and Canada alone, but it was not immediately clear how many of its future vehicles would be fully electric.
