Apple's talks with Hyundai and Kia for autonomous cars may have crashed early

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Apple's talks with Hyundai and Kia for autonomous cars may have crashed early
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  • In two separate filings to the stock-exchanges Hyundai and Kia said, “We are not having talks with Apple on developing autonomous vehicles.”
  • Post the announcement Kia Motors and Hyundai shares plunged nearly 12% and 5%, respectively, on the Korea Exchange.
  • CEO Tim Cook’s Project Titan’s goal was to launch an autonomous electric vehicle that would be Apple-branded.
  • In June 2018, It hired a former Waymo and NASA engineer to head the project “Titan” but by 2019, the project was scaled back a bit.
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Hyundai and Kia have refuted reports claiming that the South Korean car makers are nearing a deal to build Apple’s autonomous electric car by 2027. The iPhone maker has invested heavily in Project Titan, which aimed at launching a self-driving electric car, for years but started to scale back in 2019.

In two separate filings to the stock-exchanges Hyundai and Kia said, “We are not having talks with Apple on developing autonomous vehicles.” Post the announcement Kia Motors, and Hyundai shares plunged nearly 12% and 5%, respectively, on the Korea Exchange.

In January, Hyundai, which owns a majority stake in Kia, confirmed that the talks are “at an early stage, nothing has been decided.” According to Reuters, Hyundai and Apple have been in discussions about a deal since at least 2018 but Tim Cook’s company has never publicly acknowledged it.

In the last few years, Apple also has poached employees from the electric car maker Tesla. In June 2018, It hired a former Waymo and NASA engineer to head the project “Titan”.

However, in January 2019, the Silicon Valley-based tech giant cut more than 200 employees from Project Titan.

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Five months later, Apple confirmed that it had acquired Drive.ai, a self-driving startup. Cook spent over $77 million on Drive.ai’s because, reportedly, he liked the talent in the startup than its proprietary technology.

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