Recently, Doug Field, who was responsible for Apple’s Project Titan, left to join Ford.
Following this opportunity, I also sorted out the personnel division of Apple’s car manufacturing project.
Talent Loss
The talent loss of Apple’s car manufacturing project is far more than just Doug Field.
Dave Scott, who was responsible for the robot technology team related to automobiles, left in May of this year to join Hyperfine as CEO. Hyperfine, however, is not related to automobiles and is a healthcare company that develops magnetic resonance imaging systems.
In February of this year, Jaime Waydo, who was responsible for Apple’s self-driving project and was poached from Weymo in 2018, resigned and became CTO of Cavnue, a start-up company focused on autonomous driving car safety.
Also in February of this year, Benjamin Lyon, who helped establish Apple’s initial automotive team, left Apple after not being reused as head of the automotive project and became chief engineer at Astra, a technology company that launches satellites into space, which has nothing to do with automobile manufacturing.
Current “Architecture” of Apple’s Car Manufacturing
According to Bloomberg, Kevin Lynch has taken over as the automotive project manager after Field. Lynch has had a very stable work experience history, having worked at Adobe for 17 years as CTO. He joined Apple in 2013 and has been responsible for the Apple Watch project and healthcare business since.
Lynch’s main achievements at Apple are the development of WatchOS and a series of Apple software related to health (Health App in iOS devices).
Last year, Apple’s car manufacturing plan was put back on the agenda, with John Giannandrea, the senior vice president in charge of Apple’s machine learning and AI strategy, being appointed as the top leader to push it forward.
The boss who Lin Qi reported to this time was not John Giannandrea, but Jeff Williams, the COO of Apple. This is somewhat strange.
Apple’s Car Project is Still in its Early Stage, Focusing on Software Development for Now
If we take a closer look at Apple’s car project, we can find that the entire project is focused on software development. And after eight years, the project is still in its infancy, thus the Apple Car will not be released in the short term.
First of all, we know that Phil Schiller, who left Apple, has always been regarded as an important figure in the landing of the Model 3 product and has powerful hardware capabilities.
In addition, in the past six months, Apple has acquired or used product hardware technology from companies such as Hyundai, KIA, and Canoo, to accelerate the development of Apple’s car. But now, Apple seems to have given up contact with automakers. Except for hiring Ulrich Kranz, a hardware expert, hardware development has not been a priority for Apple.
Furthermore, the new head of Apple’s car project, Lin Qi, has no experience in the automotive industry and his experience in product hardware development is also inferior. In the past, he mainly focused on software development for Apple products.
Therefore, based on the above information, the current focus of Apple’s car project is on software, and there is no rush to launch hardware products. This software refers to software interaction and function innovation that companies like Apple have excelled in, as well as extremely important auxiliary/autonomous driving technology. It is just unclear whether Apple will catch up with Tesla, a company that has a huge amount of real user data, once Apple’s autonomous driving technology is launched.
🔗Sources: Bloomberg 1;Bloomberg 2
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.