The functions have been greatly reduced. Apple's self-driving products will not be seen until 2026.

There is rarely good news about Apple building cars.

According to multiple foreign media reports, Apple will scale back its self-driving plans and postpone the release date of self-driving products to 2026.

People familiar with the matter said: Apple is now planning a "less ambitious" design that only builds the functionality of the car's steering wheel and pedals and only supports full driving on the highway. Autopilot. This design will allow drivers to perform other tasks on the highway and receive an alert with enough time to switch to manual control.

As soon as the news came out, Apple’s stock price fell by 2.54%.

Looking back at Apple’s car-making, initially in 2014, Apple internally approved and launched a car-making project called “Titan” with the goal of building an electric car with fully autonomous driving capabilities. Cars, facing competition with Tesla and other car companies.

But until 2016, the project struggled with leadership confusion, visionary planning and the direction of self-driving technology. Afterwards, Apple drastically reduced its autonomous driving research and development team, laid off hundreds of engineers, and many technical executives resigned one after another.

At that time, Tesla released the Model 3 prototype, and high hopes were placed on autonomous driving applications. Apple seems to be stuck at square one, not even publicly announcing any of its plans related to autonomous driving.

Until June 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly confirmed: "We are focusing on autonomous driving systems. This is a very important core technology and our One of the most difficult AI projects underway."

In the following years, Apple tried to make efforts in the direction of autonomous driving, including hiring CJ Moore and other outstanding figures in the field of autonomous driving. Talented people serve as executives. But in the end, it did not bring any substantial progress. What frequently attracted attention was the news of the resignation of technical executives.

At the beginning of 2022, Apple’s car-building team was rumored to have been “disbanded.” 2022 was considered a “success-or-fail year” for Apple’s car-building plan.

Now Apple’s design plan only for the steering wheel and pedals shows that although Apple’s car-making team has not been disbanded, its goals and technical capabilities have been greatly reduced from the original idea.

Some people pointed out that the reason for Apple’s delay in building a car is its hesitation on the technical route. Usually, technology companies have two options for entering the automotive industry: one is to provide intelligent driving solutions to car companies; the other is to directly build cars. Before 2018, Apple focused on developing high-level assisted driving and providing intelligent solutions for car companies. The "Titan Project" was representative of this period. By 2019, Apple laid off 300 automotive team engineers and shifted to vehicle design and manufacturing. In recent years, Apple has repeatedly tried to revive the "Titan Project."

According to the latest plan, Apple will release self-driving products in 2026, when Apple will have been building cars for 12 years.

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