Apple has hired long-standing head of chassis development at Porsche for the construction of their own vehicle. Cayenne boss Dr. Manfred Harrer was considered one of the best engineers in the Volkswagen Group. Now, he’s with Apple’s Project Titan.
Jan C. Wehmeyer for BusinessInsider Deutschland:
The commitment of a chassis expert is a clear signal that Apple itself is developing a mobile stand for the iCar. The spectacular personnel change from Zuffenhausen to Silicon Valley, so far it has been quiet… At the end of last year, Harrer is said to have said goodbye to colleagues without revealing the reason. According to the LinkedIn profile, he is still an employee of Porsche. I understand that the sports car manufacturer insisted on an industry-standard lock before Harrer can start with a new employe…
The graduate engineer began his career at Audi, then move[d] to BMW, where he became a steering luminary. In May 2007, he accepted the call from Zuffenhausen, where he took over the main department of the entire chassis development from 2016. A few months before his departure, Porsche boss Oliver Blume promoted him to series manager Cayenne.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, bolstered even more with this news that Apple has hired the Porsche VP of chassis development, Apple is building a vehicle, not software to be loaded into other company’s vehicles. That’s not how Steve Jobs designed Apple to work.
Apple is working on actual vehicles, not just some “vehicleOS” they’d license out to others (which was always a stupid proposition, as anyone who’s studied how Apple works for more than 3 minutes knows implicitly). — MacDailyNews, August 28, 2018
I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do. — Steve Jobs, October 12, 2004
As we wrote back in March 2015: “When Apple enters markets, it’s because they can bring something(s) so unique to the table that significant disruption is inevitable.”
When Apple looks at what categories to enter, we ask these kinds of questions: What are the primary technologies behind this? What do we bring? Can we make a significant contribution to society with this? If we can’t, and if we can’t own the key technologies, we don’t do it. That philosophy comes directly from [Steve Jobs] and it still very much permeates the place. I hope that it always will. – Apple CEO Tim Cook, March 18, 2015
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]