Apple is reportedly laying off 614 workers after cancelling its decade-long effort to build a self-driving electric car in its first round of job cuts since the pandemic.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based iPhone maker notified employees of the layoffs on March 28, with changes to take effect on May 27, according to The Wall Stret Journal, citing state records.
Though it wasn’t immediately clear which roles were being affected, the move comes about a month after Apple axed its EV ambitions in favor of focusing more on artificial intelligence.
At the time of the announcement in late February, Apple executies told the nealy 2,000 staffers working on the autonomous high-tech vehicle that the company would wind down the team working on the car, known internally as the Special Projects Group, or SPG.
It was unclear whether former SPG workers were based in any of Apple’s eight offices in Santa Clara, Calif., where The Journal reported the layoffs are taking place.
Some SPG workers were reportedly transferred into AI roles under executive John Giannandrea, who heads machine learning and AI strategy at Apple — which has been struggling to get up to speed with rivals like Google and Microsoft, which has a $10 billion multiyear agreement with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
Hundreds of others in the SPG — many of which are hardware engineers and car designers — can either apply for another job within Apple or will be laid off, the comapny said in February.
CEO Tim Cook, however, insisted last year that layoffs at the firm would be a last resort during a time of slower hiring and cost cutting, The Journal reported.
Representatives for Apple did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
If the layoffs did, in fact, take place among SPG workers, it would cap off a decade-long effort dubbed “Project Titan” that began in 2014 with the goal of creating fully self-driving vehicles with luxurious interiors and voice-guided navigation.
Apple’s electric car was intended to differ from its rivals at Tesla and Google’s Waymo with fully autonomous capabilities and a limousine-like interior designed with hands-off driving in mind — with no steering wheels or pedals.
However, Project Titan struggled nearly from its inception.
When Apple executed test drives around tis Silicon Valley headquarters in 2022, it had trouble navigating streets and frequently bumped into curbs, veered out of lanes and into the middle of intersections. In one incident, it even nearly hit a jogger.
A revolving door of departing executives had also plagued the program.
Other troubles along the way had it scale back its ambitious plans by adding a steering wheel and pedals, then delaying its launch from 2025 to 2026, though it was still anticipted to tout a $100,000 price tag.
Now, it seems that Apple fans may never see an EV come from the tech giant.
However, demand has been waning in the US — despite a spike in international competition in the sector.
Michigan-based Ford, for example, said Thursday it delayed planned launches of three-row EVs in Canada and its next-generation electric pickup truck in Tennessee, citing slowing demand.
Meanwhile, Japanese rival Nissan laid out plans for 30 new vehicles by 2026 last week — 16 of which will be electric.
Only seven of the all-new models, though, will be reserved for the US and Canada alone, Nissan said, though it wasn’t immediately clear how many of those forthcoming vehicles would be fully electric.
