Sources: Apple has shuttered parts of its self-driving car project, laid off dozens of employees as it rethinks its strategy
SAN FRANCISCO — Apple is rethinking what it plans to do about self-driving cars, just as other big tech companies appear ready to plow ahead with competing efforts.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the first public crack in what was then one of Silicon Valley's worst-kept secrets: Apple's car effort. The layoffs and partial shutdown reported here set up a year of retreat — a late-2017 feasibility deadline imposed on the team months later, then a pivot to testing autonomy on a campus shuttle after internal disagreements over whether to build a full vehicle.
First-order effects
- Dozens of Apple employees on the car team are out of work immediately, and the parts of the program they staffed are shut down rather than reassigned.
- Apple's strategic rethink lands just as rivals in big tech commit to pushing their own self-driving efforts forward, widening the gap between Apple's ambition and the field's.
Second-order effects
- The retrenchment forces a scope decision inside Apple that plays out over years: the 190-person layoff confirmed to California regulators in 2019, including 124 engineers, shows the cuts were not a one-time trim but a repeated downsizing.
- Losing at least three top managers of the car team in 2021 signals that the scaled-back mission made it harder for Apple to retain the leadership needed to compete with fully committed rivals.
Third-order effects
- The pattern ends where the corpus says it does: Apple's 2024 abandonment of the self-driving car entirely, ceding billions in potential revenue and redirecting resources toward AI and other bets — a template for how hardware giants exit moonshots without admitting failure upfront.
The trend: Big tech's autonomous vehicle race is winnowing from build-the-car ambitions to narrower software bets, with Apple's eight-year wind-down the clearest case of a giant choosing exit over escalation.