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Detroit Warned Apple About Making a Car. It Had to Learn the Hard Way.

Tech giant’s interest in developing a car helped highlight an investment boom in Silicon Valley

Feb 28, 2024, The Wall Street Journal

The Car Guys warned Apple that the metal-bashing business could be a tough, low-margin game. But nobody wanted to listen to a bunch of dinosaurs from Detroit.

Instead, Apple joined the hoopla in Silicon Valley around the idea that a new era of the automobile was emerging, one that would seamlessly marry software and hardware and make the old guard obsolete.

In the end, for Apple, it seems making its own car turned out to be as difficult as doing its own television set. The TV dream died years ago while Apple executives just told their team this week that the work to bring out an electric vehicle was canceled, too.

The latest retreat underscores just how unlikely Elon Musk’s success with Tesla has been. To take an EV startup founded 20 years ago and turn it into a proper car company on pace to sell almost as many vehicles annually as BMW would have been hard to imagine when Apple began its own car project a decade ago.

But, Apple engineers looked jealously at the Tesla Model S, and probably thought to themselves: We can top that!

With sweeping curves, lightning acceleration and an iPad-like dashboard, Tesla’s electric sedan was often called an iPhone-on-wheels and what many thought a car might look like if Apple had entered the industry.

Just a few years into his role as Apple chief executive, Tim Cook greenlighted a secret, ambitious plan—dubbed Project Titan—for the company to build its own car. When word of the project became public in 2015, it was greeted by a mixture of hysteria and disbelief.

“I think somebody is kind of trying to cough up a hairball here,”

General Motors’ then-retired Chief Executive Dan Akerson told me around that time, echoing the same sort of sentiment entrenched players had when Apple was first getting into cellphones.

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