No more Apple electric car! Tech giant bins plans to build a Tesla rival after a decade of development and billions spent

Apple has announced to its employees that it will axe plans to build an electric car to rival the likes of Tesla (and now many other brands) after almost 10 years of development, investment and hurdles.

The company reportedly disclosed the information to employees and investors in the US on Tuesday, with many of the thousands who were working on the electric car program (called Project Titan) being caught by surprise.

The news comes only weeks after reports that Apple was still going ahead with the projects, but had simplified plans and intended on a release by the end of the decade.

Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, an Apple vice0president, were the ones who made the announcement, according to Bloomberg.

As the project winds down, many of the employees who were involved with the EV development will shift focus to generative AI projects, while some will be let go from the company.

The Apple car project was reportedly still years away from producing a car, despite having kicked off in the first half of the 2010s.

At the time of the Apple car being a relatively fresh but unknown quantity, traditional car brands were uneasy about the future of the industry that has remained relatively unchanged for a long time, though in some cases watched the emergence of hi-tech entries to the space with interest.

"They are incredibly serious. What's more, I think their interest is exactly what this industry needed. We needed a disruptive interloper to shake things up," Sergio Marchionne, then boss of Fiat-Chrysler, said in 2015 to the BBC.

Apple then had “several hundred people working on its electric car project”, according to the British news organisation, as car companies began to resign themselves to the idea they would need to partner with, rather than rival, tech companies like Apple and Google.

Recently, the highest profile example of this might be the joint venture between Honda and Sony - called Afeela - which has three electric models in the pipeline.

Through the years of the Apple car project’s evolution, several changes, rumours and hurdles popped up, notably Apple’s partnership with Volkswagen at one point to test technology and even develop a T6 Transporter autonomous bus.

External factors played a large role in the end of the project for Apple, including increased competition from legacy brands, difficulties developing self-driving to the level needed for a market launch and a global slowdown in the increasing uptake of EVs.

A similar, but shorter-lived, electric car project was undertaken by another tech mogul, James Dyson (yes, the vacuum specialist) in the late 2010s, though was cancelled within a couple of years after realising the costs of development (almost US$1B by the time it ended) wouldn’t be worth the result.