Alexander Lewis 
Apr 05, 2024
A representational image of an electric vehicle. — Pixabay
Almost a month after calling off its electric car project, Apple is about to lay off 600 employees reportedly associated with the company's abandoned project.
This has emerged in a mandatory notice Apple issued to the state of California, verifying its plans to permanently fire 600 employees. Under the law implemented in California, employers, such as Apple, are obliged to issue a 60-day notice to employees and state representatives before observing an en masse layoff event.
What corroborates to the supposition of these employees' former association with the project is that they are located in several Apple-occupied buildings around Santa Clara, California. These buildings are in the close vicinity of Apple's Cupertino headquarters.
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According to MacRumors, many of these building were believed to be associated with Apple Car project in the past. This connection between the listed employees and the buildings they were posted serves as a rectification that layoffs are related to Apple's abandoned car project.
The project was officially nullified by the iPhone maker in March, with a workforce of approximately 2,000 employees deployed on the Apple Car was informed about the project's cancellation at that time. In the follow up, Apple relocated some of those 2,000 employees to work in its project departments related to artificial intelligence (AI) — under the supervision of John Giannandrea — and other.
The rest of the employees were given 90 days to apply for vacant positions open within the company. But since the Apple Car project's workforce was a specialised one in hardware engineering and car designing, these employees may not have had skills suitable to other projects.
Recently, the company has also ended the development of its in-house microLED displays, which indicates that the current layoff may partly have to do something with this called off project.
