Apple's rumored car project has reportedly hit a roadblock.

As the New York Times reports, Cupertino has struggled to bring some of that headphone jack "courage" to the electric car space, and recently "laid of dozens" of people as its car effort, dubbed Project Titan, shrinks.

We've heard rumors for more than a year, but Apple has never publicly acknowledged that it's working on a car. CEO Tim Cook has remained coy about it. "Do you remember when you were a kid, and Christmas Eve, it was so exciting, you weren't sure what was going to be downstairs? Well, it's going to be Christmas Eve for a while," Cook said at a recent shareholders' meeting.

But it's easy to put the pieces of the puzzle together. From securing car-related domain names to hiring car executives from the like of Tesla, it's clear that Apple is at least exploring the idea.

But cars are a different beast than phones and tablets. According to the Times, citing anonymous sources, Apple's 1,000-person-strong team "struggled to explain what Apple could bring to a self-driving car that other companies could not."

In January, the veteran Apple employee who was running Apple's car project, Steve Zadesky, left the company. Bob Mansfield, former Apple Senior Vice President of technologies, effectively came out of retirement to replace him earlier this summer. Cupertino then started taking a more Google approach, shifting from vehicle hardware to software and hiring BlackBerry exec Dan Dodge, former founder and CEO of QNX.

Main image courtesy of designer Meni Tsirbas (@MeniThings; YouTube)

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