A source with knowledge of the situation told Reuters on Tuesday that Apple has halted work on an electric vehicle, ten years after the iPhone manufacturer began the project.
After somewhat paring some losses from early in the trading day, the company’s shares were up 0.7% in afternoon trade.
The company’s artificial intelligence (AI) branch will be receiving a number of staff members who were working on the electric car project, as first reported by Bloomberg News.
Apple said it would not comment.
The sector has reduced employment and output as a result of the consumer backlash caused by high borrowing rates intended to contain inflation and the decline in demand for electric vehicles, which are often more expensive.
Many large automakers have made the decision to reduce their investments, with some refocusing their plans to concentrate on hybrids rather than entirely battery-powered vehicles. Among these is Tesla, the market leader in EVs.
A surge of enthusiasm in self-driving cars raced through Silicon Valley a decade ago, when Apple launched Project Titan, as its internal name for its automotive project.
In 2020, Reuters said that Apple was thinking of launching a car as early as 2024 or 2025.
However, there had been unequal progress long before the COVID-19 pandemic rocked the world auto industry.
After reorganizing its software strategy in 2019, Apple let go of 190 employees from the group.
Additionally, the concept car’s design was altered from a radical autonomous automobile without a steering wheel, which would have deviated from normal automotive design, to a more traditional car with cutting-edge driver-assistance capabilities.