Who Killed The Apple Car?

A year ago, Apple seemed poised to take over, along with Tesla, the self-driving vehicle market. Who wouldn't love a car powered by an Apple OS? In fact, I wrote that Apple could render car makers like Lamborghini and Ferrari into 'skin' designers, i.e., creating mere exteriors for Apples OS. 

But today, the autonomous vehicle market looks a bit different. We have American car manufacturers testing self-driving vehicles, and companies like Uber and Lyft testing those cars out to power fleets of self-driving taxis. 

What about Apple?

In a recent article in Bloomberg, Apple has been struggling with its Apple Car project, called Titan, and has thus scaled back the project. This has led "to hundreds of job cuts and a new direction that, for now, no longer includes building its own car, according to people familiar with the project," reports Bloomberg. 

Now the key shift for Apple is building a self-driving vehicle system that is flexible and thus can be used in partnership with other automakers, or to design and build its own vehicle. Apple has set a date late into next year at which time it will determine the feasibility of the program and whether it is going to fully move forward with it. 

There remain considerable roadblocks for building cars that a computer company like Apple is finding out, for instance the complexities involved in auto parts supply chains. In phone manufacturing, Apple in many cases holds exclusive rights to certain parts. But auto parts dealers that require heavy investment on the front end are leery of committing fully to a company like Apple whose initial shipments will be small. 

The question in the back of many people's minds when they read this kind of report is 'What would Steve Jobs do?" He was a master at listing ten major projects, then crossing off seven to leave three that Apple would throw all its weight into. Would he be spending money and resources and precious time on an autonomous vehicle? Maybe. Would he have succeeded already? With Steve Jobs reality distortion field, you or I might already be driving one . . .