At 3 o'clock in the morning Beijing time today, Apple broke the news reporter Mark Gurman, citing insiders: Apple canceled a decade-long electric car plan and abandoned one of the most ambitious projects in the company's history.
Just now, Apple's cancellation of the car rushed to the hot search.
In this regard, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun posted on Weibo about Apple's cancellation of car manufacturing. Lei Jun said: "I was very shocked when I saw this news!Xiaomi's strategy is 'people, cars and families are all ecological', we know the difficulty of building a car, and we still made an extremely firm strategic choice 3 years ago, and seriously build a good car for rice noodles!”
Apple's internal disclosure on Tuesday came as a surprise to the nearly 2,000 employees involved in the project, according to people familiar with the matter.
Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Vice President of the job, Kevin Lynch, made the decision together, according to people familiar with the matter. The two executives told employees that the program would begin to taper and that many of the employees working in automotive research and development would be relocated to the artificial intelligence department. These employees will focus on generative AI projects, which is an increasingly important priority for the company. The Apple Car team also has hundreds of hardware engineers and car designers who are likely to apply for jobs on other Apple teams as well.
The company will lay off employees, but it is unclear how many will be laid off.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk also posted on social media about Apple's decision, with a tribute emoji and a cigarette on it.
Electric vehicle analyst Sawyer Merrett commented: "Apple spent 10 years trying to make electric cars with $162 billion in cash reserves, but ultimately came to the conclusion that it was too difficult and that the margins were too small – even if it was priced at $100,000. Initially, Apple wanted it to be a fully self-driving car, but they didn't have a fleet, real-world data, and no experience to make it happen. There are only two major automakers in the United States that have not gone bankrupt: Tesla and Ford. Musk replied below: "The natural state of a car company is death. ”
According to past sources, Apple began to develop the car in 2014, and its initial ambition was to create a luxury car with L5 level full autonomy. However, it took more than ten years, during which the person in charge was changed several times, and finally the board of directors had the idea of "breaking up".
In 2022, Apple lowered its target to "L4 autonomous driving in 2026". However, the revelations in January this year showed that Apple lowered its target to "L2+ level autonomous driving, launched in 2028". The news was once seen as a compromise between Apple and itself, and the car with the lowered target was finally expected to hit the market. But the latest developments suggest that the bar is too low for the board to bear.
Gurman revealed that Apple's top management made the decision to stop the project in recent weeks. Apple had envisioned pricing its cars at $100,000, but executives were concerned about whether the ** would deliver the high profit margins they were accustomed to, and that the company would spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on a project that might never come to fruition.
Before the news was announced, Apple's stock price fell by about 0.About 5%. With such a billion-dollar project being axed, Apple's stock price quickly rallied, up 081%。