I get what you're saying, however I don't think that's true:
> the goal was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle
Otherwise, why release a device like the Apple Vision Pro? It's also very far from the holy grail of AR/VR.
It's very heard to beat the state of the art. It's almost impossible to surpass it by some unbelievable margin. It seems very unlikely that fully autonomous driving was the goalpost for going to market.
Much more likely, the project failed for more mundane reasons -- they figured out their EV would be somewhere between a Tesla and a Mercedes on the luxury scale, but with better integration into the Apple ecosystem. When the market for EVs cooled down and many traditional car companies already launched EVs, it became clear that they're both too late and entering a highly competitive market with small margins.
In 2016 the Lyft cofounder predicted that by 2021 the majority of their network would be fully autonomous. The general public was led to believe that the technology was close to fruition. Apple execs having similar aspirations at the time makes sense. But we now know that that prediction isn’t coming true any time soon.
I’m not sure why everyone thinks that Apple only wanted to create an EV to compete with Tesla or BYD. Given that the Apple execs thought that fully autonomous driving was achievable, it’s possible that Apple wanted to introduce a mobile entertainment pod-type product which may have been relatively lucrative as a premium luxury product at first and later could have become a good product for keeping mindshare when the general public used it for their daily two hour commutes.
But after COVID started the work from home movement, Apple pivoting to a product like Apple Vision Pro makes more sense when the importance of commuting lessened. Peering backwards in time the decisions that Apple made look logical. Now whether Apple can monetize generative AI by leveraging their iDevices market share will determine whether they can make it to a 4T market cap. Apple has a tough mountain to climb going forward since none of these products are sure hits like the iPhone was.
> the goal was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle
Otherwise, why release a device like the Apple Vision Pro? It's also very far from the holy grail of AR/VR.
It's very heard to beat the state of the art. It's almost impossible to surpass it by some unbelievable margin. It seems very unlikely that fully autonomous driving was the goalpost for going to market.
Much more likely, the project failed for more mundane reasons -- they figured out their EV would be somewhere between a Tesla and a Mercedes on the luxury scale, but with better integration into the Apple ecosystem. When the market for EVs cooled down and many traditional car companies already launched EVs, it became clear that they're both too late and entering a highly competitive market with small margins.