Apart from building smartphones, which consists half of the sales for Apple, two years ago, the company started working on a car project incognito. Though not all details are kept secret for long, because of some confirmations, everyone now knows that it will be a self-driving car.
Apple is known for its secrecy, so apart from the code name of the project, no specific details were out about Project Titan.
Rumors circulated that Apple is searching around Silicon Valley for an 800,000 square foot of new space to serve as a testing facility for its self-driving technology.
Everyone is waiting for Apple's big revelation of their automotive venture, but just this summer, project head Steven Zadesky left the company as Apple says, due to "personal reasons."
Zadesky is then replaced by Bob Mansfield and the company reportedly laid off dozens of senior employees. This intensified the speculations that Apple is making a complete reboot of the program.
The focus of the project is now reportedly changed, shifting from an emphasis on designing and producing an automobile to building out the underlying technology for an autonomous vehicle. Though they are now focused on the technology that they will be using, they are not letting go of the possibility of building their own vehicle.
Apple also hired Dan Dodge, the founder and former chief executive officer of QNX — the operating system developer that BlackBerry used — to work under Mansfield and the Project Titan. This is to strengthen the team and make progress in the technology of the vehicle.
Apple is not the only tech company that started to develop self-driving cars. Tesla already has the "autopilot feature" in some of its models and Tesla just announced that the autopilot version 8 will be out and it will have new better features.
Alphabet, Google's parent company has been testing self-driving cars on the road for years now. Uber is will also start picking up passengers on self-driving cars on Pittsburgh starting next week according to reports.
With Apple trying its best to hide every detail of this project, reports say that this project will launch in 2021. Until then, we can only make speculations.
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