The Apple Car could well be one of Apple's biggest unactualized projects, since the company reportedly spent a decade and $10 billion on developing an autonomous vehicle — only to abandon it in 2024 after realizing that it just wasn't possible. Now it's been suggested that all that work didn't go to waste. In fact, we might have the Apple Car to thank for the way Apple handles its myriad of artificial intelligence features.This report comes from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, who claims that Apple's lofty goal of developing a Level 5 autonomous car actually pushed the company to kickstart its first large-scale push into AI. Obviously, the company needed hardware to handle all the immense AI processing in real time, and while that never actually happened, the work still laid the groundwork for other things.As Gurman says, the most notable example is the Neural Engine, which is the part of Apple's chips that handles all the on-device AI. This tech launched earlier than many realized too, debuting on 2017's iPhone X as part of the A11 Bionic chipset. The Neural Engine is a series of AI accelerators, designed to facilitate real-time AI features such as Face ID, augmented reality and the Apple Intelligence suite.The idea behind Apple's Engine, rather than a traditional Neural Processing Unit, is that it's supposed to offer high efficiency, with minimal battery consumption, while also ensuring extra privacy by processing on your device.The Neural Engine has been a part of every M-series chip, starting with the original Apple M1 in 2020, which allowed the Mac to be a powerhouse for local AI processing. The work is also reported to have influenced the Ultra Mac chips, and the custom hardware used to power Apple Intelligence's cloud servers.Apple Car paved the way for Apple's new AI strategy