The Apple Car could well be one of Apple's biggest unactualized projects, since the company reportedly spent a decade and $10 billion on developing an autonomous vehicle — only to abandon it in 2024 after realizing that it just wasn't possible. Now it's been suggested that all that work didn't go to waste. In fact, we might have the Apple Car to thank for the way Apple handles its myriad of artificial intelligence features.
This report comes from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, who claims that Apple's lofty goal of developing a Level 5 autonomous car actually pushed the company to kickstart its first large-scale push into AI. Obviously, the company needed hardware to handle all the immense AI processing in real time, and while that never actually happened, the work still laid the groundwork for other things.
