Apple employees referred to doomed Apple Car project as ‘The Titanic Disaster’

Apple Car as per Richard Scarry

For the last decade, many Apple employees working on the company’s secretive “Project Titan” electric vehicle project called it “The Titanic Disaster.” (We’d have gone with “Project Titanic.”) Amidst the layoffs, constant staffing and goal changes, and a general stench of failure permeating the effort, they knew the project was doomed to fail, The New York Times reports Thursday.

Brian X. Chen and Tripp Mickle for The New York Times:
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Throughout its existence, the car effort was scrapped and rebooted several times, shedding hundreds of workers along the way. As a result of dueling views among leaders about what an Apple car should be, it began as an electric vehicle that would compete against Tesla and morphed into a self-driving car to rival Google’s Waymo.

By the time of its death — Tuesday, when executives announced internally that the project was being killed and that many members of the team were being reassigned to work on artificial intelligence — Apple had burned more than $10 billion on the project and the car had reverted to its beginnings as an electric vehicle with driving-assistance features rivaling Tesla’s, according to a half dozen people who worked on the project over the past decade.

The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011… Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, approved the project in part to prevent an exodus of engineers to Tesla.

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MacDailyNews Take: Unfocused dysfunctional hubris is exactly what competent leadership avoids.
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