A Tour Through the Apple Car’s Long Road to Failure

For the last decade Apple Inc. has been working on building a car and spending, on average, $1 billion a year on the project. Tim Cook shut down plans to acquire Tesla before cycling through a junkyard’s worth of self-driving designs. Apple never got close to realizing its original vision, or any of its subsequent ones. It didn’t get as far as testing a full-scale prototype on public roads. The enormous technical difficulty of its self-driving goals, as well as the punishing economics of the automaking business were both impediments, however the project was also a failure, at the highest levels of the company, to settle on one thing and do it.