Apple’s Unconfirmed Secret Car Project Reportedly Delayed Until 2021

According to The Information, Apple’s secret electric car dubbed ‘Project Titan’, has reportedly delayed its rumoured target launch date by another year to 2021.

The article profiles the Sumner brothers, who are engineers working at Apple on the said car project. These employees are so important to Apple, the company has let one of them work remotely back home in North Carolina, a move typically reserved for key employees.

The paywalled article notes near the end (via AP):

The group has run into challenges, say people briefed about aspects of Titan along with other reports. Its top executive left in January, a sign that things there weren’t going well. One person who worked briefly with the Titan team was told during their tenure at Apple that the company had been trying to deliver a vehicle by 2020 but the target slipped to 2021.

Said challenges for the Apple Car are the processing, collecting and storing of data from self-driving car sensors, which can generate two gigabytes of data per mile.

This data is reportedly being stored on Apple’s servers, which has resulted in other employees from the Siri team moving over to help on the car project, which is familiar with similar problems.

There could a Canadian connection to the car project, as previously it was said Apple had leased a 22,000 square foot space in Kanata, suspected for R&D purposes, located next to QNX, the automotive division from BlackBerry.

Earlier this year, speaking at the company’s annual shareholder meeting, CEO Tim Cook answered with the following when asked about their rumoured electric vehicle plans:

Do you remember when you were a kid, and Christmas Eve, it was so exciting, you weren’t sure what was going to be downstairs? Well, it’s going to be Christmas Eve for a while.

So this means if you’re still waiting for Apple Car to debut, it’s going to be longer, approximately five and a half years from now, if the above report is true.