Apple Hits Technical Roadblocks, Delays the Launch of its Self-Driving Vehicles by 2026

Apple takes a notch down on their ambitious future plans to enter the automobile market with self-driving cars in 2025. According to Bloomberg’s report, the project is now postponed to 2026. 

The reason: Apple said that the project Titan (the internal car tech team at Apple) had been pushed back due to technical limitations. In addition, the automobile organisation Ford Motor poached its main engineering executive Doug Field, who was handling special projects. Other members of the team also left the project eventually. 

Full self-driving cars remain a distant reality: Automobile giants have always faced difficulties making self-driving cars a reality. Tesla, who also ventured into this field with “fully self-driving” cars, is now facing legal charges by the US Department of Justice and Criminal Investigation because of the dozen accidents caused due to their “Autopilot” mode. A month ago, ‘Argo AI’, the Ford and VW-backed autonomous vehicle technology company, announced that it was suspending operations due to lack of funding. 

Self-driving vehicles are always five years away: Self-driving vehicles seemed promising a decade ago when industry leaders anticipated that they would become a reality in five years, which of course, did not happen as it is 2022, and the hope of having automatic vehicles is taking U-turns. Interestingly, all these promises of automated cars have a five-year plan. For example, BMW partnered with Mobileye and Intel in 2016 and promised fully self-driving car production by 2021. However, it collaborated with Mercedes in 2019 to have level 4 autonomous vehicles by 2024. Toyota, Honda and similar companies also made such commitments.