Apple’s first car, delayed until 2026, won’t be self-driving – TechCrunch

Apple has spoken a big game about its future plans to break into the automotive market. But one Bloomberg report says Apple had to scale back its plans. Last year, apple said it would launch a fully self-driving car in 2025, but now the vehicle is delayed until 2026 and will not be self-driving.

Apple sought to build the first completely autonomous vehicle, without the need for a steering wheel or pedals. But according to the report, engineers working on the project (known internally as Titan) no longer believe the vision is possible with current technology.

Apple experienced a number of executive reshuffles within the Titan team, which could have influenced this delay. Last year, Ford Motor hung Field Doug, the engineering manager who was in charge of this special projects team at Apple. A few months ago, several other key players on the Titan project left the company.

Even companies with a long history in the automotive space have struggled to make the dream of self-driving a reality. Of course, Tesla also strived to achieve this feat with its misleading name”fully autonomous driving“, which was launched in beta in October 2020 and is now the subject of a Department of Justice criminal investigation. Launched last year, the investigation was opened following more than a dozen crashes involving the active use of Tesla’s Autopilot system, some of which have resulted in fatalities.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch reported in October that AI Argo, the autonomous vehicle unicorn backed by Ford and Volkswagen, would shut down. Ford later said in its report on the results that it would focus more on advanced driver assistance systems than self-driving technology.