$10 billion spending, plan to buy Tesla, Siri instead of steering: New report reveals details of Apple car plans

However, this week, the company officially pulled the plug on the ambitious project, marking a closer to its plans of entering the automotive sector.

According to the New York Times, from the very beginning, Apple’s development of a car was plagued by internal disagreements, technical hurdles, and leadership changes, ultimately costing the company over $10 billion without ever producing a marketable car.

The NYT report reveals that although Apple started work on Project Titan with full momentum, many Apple employees sensed the downfall of this project and hence used to refer to it as the “Titanic disaster.” And they had reasons for it.

Rise of Titan amidst falling iPhone sales

Apple’s journey to build its Titan started in 2014 when the company was witnessing a decline in the sales of its flagship product, the iPhone. iPhone sales reportedly dropped by 16 percent in the first quarter of the year-and an even more dramatic 32 percent from the last quarter of 2015. So, while grappling with falling sales, Apple began its ambition to introduce a new product and, in fact, enter the growing and lucrative market of cars.

Planning to buy Tesla from Elon Musk

Apple reportedly even started discussions with Elon Musk to buy Tesla; however, soon the company thought to build its own car and enter the electric vehicle market as a competitor. In fact, in early 2014, Tesla Boss Musk even confirmed to Bloomberg that Apple was considering purchasing Tesla; however, he quoted that the acquisition of Tesla seemed “very unlikely.”

“If one or more companies had approached us last year about such things, there’s no way we could really comment on that. We had conversations with Apple, I can’t comment on whether those revolved around any kind of acquisition,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television