TECH NEWS – The self-driving car industry could have made the Cupertino-based company as much money as two of its popular product lines.

After a decade of development, Apple has shut down its self-driving car project, putting many of its employees out of work.According to the company, Project Titan would not have been commercially viable and would have struggled to compete with Tesla, for example, and would have fallen behind in the price war.But now we hear that if it had been able to sell a fraction of the devices, it could have generated the revenue of its two product lines combined!

Apple’s e-cars would have sold for at least $100,000.Apple is said to have invested $10 billion in Project Titan, and although none of the cars made it to store shelves, the company gained valuable technological resources that it could then apply to other products. Mark Gurman wrote in Bloomberg’s Power On newsletter that while profit margins are slim, a smaller shipment would have generated billions of dollars:

“An Apple car was seen as the “ultimate mobile device,” and it’s easy to see why the prospect was exciting.It’s a low-margin industry, but the cars could have fetched $100,000 each.Even if Apple sold only a fraction of Tesla Inc.’s units, this could have been a $50 billion business (or about the size of the iPad and Mac combined),” Gurman wrote.

So 10 billion cost, 50 billion from one shipment.Even without net profit, we are still talking about five times that amount.Other automakers would have been over the moon with that result, but Apple may have set unrealistic expectations.And with the cancellation of Project Titan, the company has turned its attention to robotics, and we’ve already written about its walking and table-top robot projects.The former would be good for household chores.

So Project Titan will no longer be a reality.

Source: WCCFTech