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Autonomous Vehicles

Apple eyeing aggressive 2025 debut for self-driving car

The timeline comes after yet another leadership shakeup for the company’s auto project.
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Francis Scialabba

less than 3 min read

You know what they say: death, taxes, and “Apple Car” rumors.

The latest on the latter: Bloomberg reports that Apple has an aggressive new internal timeline for Project Titan, its automotive endeavor. Apple reportedly wants to debut a fully driverless electric vehicle by 2025.

  • That’s sooner than the 2026–2028 window engineers had reportedly been planning for, but a bit later than a 2024 target Reuters reported last December.
  • The updated vision comes after a leadership shakeup in September, when Apple’s head of smartwatch and health software, Kevin Lynch, took over Project Titan. He’s the project’s fifth exec in the ~7 years since it began.

Where’s the confidence coming from?

According to Bloomberg, Apple thinks it’s close to finishing an in-house, purpose-built chip for its eventual car. Self-driving cars have to process an incredible amount of data in real time in order to safely function. For context, when Nvidia created a chip for AVs in 2017, it decided 320 trillion operations per second was a reasonable processing capacity.

FWIW...Last year, Apple was also rumored to be exploring lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries—a safer, cheaper, but lower-range battery chemistry that Tesla also says it will start using in standard-range vehicles.

Looking ahead...The hard part is building a safe, reliable self-driving car from scratch. But the road doesn’t end there: Apple also has to find a business model that makes sense—something that’s being debated internally, per Bloomberg—and begin manufacturing the cars at a scale large enough to support that model.

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Tech Brew keeps business leaders up-to-date on the latest innovations, automation advances, policy shifts, and more, so they can make informed decisions about tech.