> the goal was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle
Otherwise, why release a device like the Apple Vision Pro? It's also very far from the holy grail of AR/VR.
It's very heard to beat the state of the art. It's almost impossible to surpass it by some unbelievable margin. It seems very unlikely that fully autonomous driving was the goalpost for going to market.
Much more likely, the project failed for more mundane reasons -- they figured out their EV would be somewhere between a Tesla and a Mercedes on the luxury scale, but with better integration into the Apple ecosystem. When the market for EVs cooled down and many traditional car companies already launched EVs, it became clear that they're both too late and entering a highly competitive market with small margins.