JAKARTA - Apple Car ternyata bukan mitos urban Silicon Valley. Ia nyata, mahal, ambisius, lalu dikubur rapi. Fakta itu justru bocor bukan dari Apple, melainkan dari Airbnb - sebuah plot twist yang bahkan penulis skenario HBO pun mungkin angkat alis.
This certainty came from Airbnb's internal announcement about its new CTO, Ahmad Al-Dahle. In the official bio sent to employees, Airbnb, without hesitation, called Al-Dahle the founder and leader of Apple's autonomous technology group since 2014, responsible for the core AI system for Apple's driverless car project. One sentence, the effect is like dropping a 12-inch bolt on the floor of the Apple Park meeting room.
Apple itself, consistent with its tradition, remained silent. There was no clarification, no admission, no "one more thing". In fact, this project is believed to have been running for more than a decade, involving thousands of engineers, hundreds of patents, and funds whose numbers are more suitable to be called "astronomical" rather than "billions".
Apple Car's footprint is actually too big to hide. Patents with pictures of cars, suspension systems, to turn signals have been circulating for a long time. The autonomous vehicle test permit is also not fiction. Since 2017 Apple has bagged a test permit on public roads, and in 2024 it is recorded to have more than 200 registered drivers, before all of them were canceled. That is the most honest signal: the project has been stopped.
Business-wise, the Apple Car is a failure. Apple tried to make a car and failed to release it. But the context is important. Almost all major players in the industry have also failed to deliver on the promise of "full self-driving". Tesla still promises a future that is always a year away, repeating like a soap opera episode. On the other hand, Apple chose to stop before the promise turned into a legal burden.
Interestingly, this failure is not a black hole. Apple's investment in the car project actually nurtures many technologies that users now enjoy. AI research, sensors, processor efficiency, heat management, and real-time system integration are born from the extreme needs of autonomous vehicles. The driverless car environment is a hell for AI: everything must be instant, accurate, and must not be wrong, even once.
The legacy is evident in the latest generation of CarPlay and Apple Intelligence. A system that can read context, process superfast parallel data, and prioritize safety does not emerge from a vacuum. The Apple Car may never get to the garage, but its DNA is parked in the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Ironically, the most explicit confirmation came from another company that might not care too much about Apple's NDA. Airbnb just wanted to introduce a new CTO. Unintentionally, they closed a long debate about "whether the Apple Car ever existed".
The answer is now simple: it exists. Apple tried it. Apple failed. Then Apple harvested its knowledge, as usual. In Cupertino, failure is not the end of the story - it's just R&D that is too ambitious to be given a stage.
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