In a sign of attrition within “Project Titan,” Apple’s self-driving vehicle effort, Apple has lost multiple top managers of its team in recent months.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
The iPhone maker has hundreds of engineers working on underlying self-driving car technology as well as groups of employees working on an actual vehicle, Bloomberg News has reported. Running the division is Doug Field, a former top vehicle engineer for Tesla Inc., along with a management team of fewer than a dozen executives. At least three members of that Apple car management team have departed this year.
Despite the recent departures, Apple has added notable names to the car team over the past few years, including former top Tesla executives in charge of drive systems and manufacturing engineering, car interiors and exteriors and self-driving software. The team also includes other car industry veterans and executives who have developed key Apple products.
John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of machine learning and artificial intelligence, has overseen the car project since late last year…
MacDailyNews Take: People come, people go, that’s a basically the (filler) story from Bloomberg News here. The project, which is in the hands of the very capable Giannandrea and Field, will hopefully, uh, bear fruit down the road. 😉
Winter 2022, the reveal of the Apple CUV arrives.
I’d call it a great sign of a huge company being able to act nimbly. The “Project” has exhibited this kind of transition since inception and earlier on, such changes were interpreted as doom. With the history of–seemingly big–changes the Project continued and, as MDN inserts, with Giannandrea still at the helm, there’s little reason to interpret the departure of at least 3 from the Apple car management team, as anything but fine-tuning, imo.
Nothing, yet…
Lame MDN excuses aside, there will be no Apple Car, the most we’ll ever see is perhaps info systems and some automation.. No car.
It took 6 years for the latest MacPro to arrive, so another 50 or so years for a car.