A little over a year ago, Apple was speeding up its quest to join the electric car market, announcing that it hoped to have a vehicle ready by 2019. Fast forward to today, and the company is reportedly putting the brakes on that plan.

Apple no longer plans to build a car, at least not for now, those ever-insightful “people familiar with the matter” tell Bloomberg, resulting in a shakeup in the workforce attached to “Project Titan”: out of the 1,000 people on the car team, hundreds have been let go, reassigned, or have gone elsewhere on their own recently, the insiders said.

There’s a new team on the project and they’re now focused on developing an autonomous driving system instead, one that would allow Apple to partner with existing carmakers or decide to design its own vehicle after all, those in the know explained.

The head honchos have handed down a deadline of late 2017 to prove that a self-driving system could become a reality and decide on a final direction, insiders claim, while an Apple spokesman declined to comment to Bloomberg.

Apple isn’t the only one struggling to figure out how to build a branded car, despite success in the world of mobile gadgets and technology: Google has also had issues, and has said it will work with all carmakers in its driverless car quest.

How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit [Bloomberg]

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