Shift your expectations, Apple’s electric vehicle reportedly won’t debut until 2021

A Tesla-style concept of the Apple Car from CarWow

News around Project Titan, the name given to Apple’s electric vehicle ambitions has been relatively quiet lately despite the anticipated introduction in 2020 inching closer by the day. That may be because the introduction target for Apple Car has moved back one year to 2021. Included in a profile of three brothers who are said to have worked on the Apple Car initiative, The Information includes this detail:

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.

Prior to this report, it was widely believed that Apple was targeting the year 2020 to unveil its electric vehicle in some form, although that was over a year ago. There have since been multiple signs that Project Titan could have roadblocks along the way.

In January, Steve Zadesky who was leading the project, reportedly left Apple after 16 years for personal reasons. Electrek’s sister-site 9to5Mac profiled several high-level employees working on the project a year ago. Recent reports, however, have described Project Titan of consisting of around 600 people.

The last big piece of news around Apple’s electric vehicle ambitions came in the form of Apple looking into its own charging solutions that would essentially replace gas stations for EV drivers. Apple also made a billion dollar investment in Didi Chuxing, China’s Uber, which many see as a sign that it’s interested in the car space.

Tesla’s Elon Musk, however, already jabbed that 2020 could be too late for Apple to enter the electric car market. Speaking earlier this year at Recode’s technology conference, Musk teased that Apple should have started their effort sooner:

I think they should have embarked on this project sooner. I don’t think they’ll be in production sooner until 2020. Is that too late? […]

The sheer scale of automotive manufacturing is hard to imagine until you see the plants. The size of the industrial infrastructure is astonishing.

Musk did offer this line of encouragement during the same appearance, however:

I think it’s great they’re doing this, and I hope it works out.

In the meantime, Tesla is moving forward openly and ambitiously with a ten-year vision detailed just last night in Elon Musk’s Tesla Master Plan: Part Two.