Apple Inc. is laying off 190 staff members who were working on its “Project Titan” self-driving car development project, confirming reports first published Jan. 24.

The exact number of layoffs came via a filing Apple lodged today with the California Employment Development Department. The staff to be cut are housed in two Apple offices: Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, both in the Bay Area and not far from Apple’s head office in Cupertino.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the cuts include 38 engineering program managers, 33 hardware engineers, 31 product design engineers and 22 software engineers. The layoffs are also said to take effect April 16.

Reports that Apple’s self-driving car project has been in trouble go back years. Apple was first reported to be developing a so-called “Apple Car” from the ground up, going back to the early parts of the decade. In 2016, though, the company Steve Jobs built abandoned attempts to build its own car, instead switching to developing technology that can be used in autonomous vehicles, purging 1,000 employees in the process.

Apple’s attempts to deliver even self-driving car technology for other vehicles hasn’t been going well either. On Feb. 13 it was reported that Apple ranked last out of 48 companies testing autonomous vehicle technology in California in term of safety. Apple’s self-driving car technology required human intervention nearly every mile driven.

More precisely, the cars required some 872 disengagements for every 1,000 miles driven. By comparison, Waymo LLC, the company formerly known as Google’s self-driving car project, had 0.09 disengagements per 1000 miles, or 11,154.3 miles per disengagement.

How the layoffs affect whatever Apple is currently working on is at best a guess given Apple’s ongoing obsession with secrecy. “The nature of Apple’s testing, and the systems it’s trialing, are still a relative mystery,” Slashgear noted. “Project Titan remains one of the more secretive projects within the company, though periodic insight has been gained courtesy of regulatory reports. ”

Given that the nascent market is ripe with startups, the fired Apple employees will likely find employment elsewhere in short order. Autonomous car companies that have raised venture capital are a dime a dozen. For instance, on Feb. 5, Ike Robotics Inc. raised a $52 million round.

Image: automobileitalia/Flickr