Developments related to Apple’s automobile project had not fallen off the agenda in the past months and we shared it with you. The automobile project that Apple was working on, which was claimed to challenge Tesla and other giants of the industry in 2025, was carried out in secret.
However, it seems that this project of Apple will not reach the determined calendar. Mark Gurman, known for his important statements on Apple, announced that the team in Apple’s autonomous car project was gradually disintegrating.
Problems do not end in Apple’s autonomous vehicle project
In the latest issue of the Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman informed that Apple has parted ways with the chief engineer from his team from the autonomous car project. According to Gurman, Joe Bass, chief engineer of software engineering program management for Apple’s auto team, left the company after seven years. Bass also confirmed this separation on his LinkedIn page. Joe Bass is currently hiring at Meta as the technical program management manager.
Mark Gurman made the following statement on this subject; “With Bass leaving, almost the entire Apple auto management team that was in office just a year ago is gone. Dave Scott, Jaime Waydo, Dave Rosenthal, and Benjamin Lyon left in early 2021. Doug Field, who led the car team, announced his ties to the company in September 2021. Michael Schwekutsch, who was in charge of Apple’s autonomous vehicle project hardware department, soon followed. Then the top engineers kept coming. Then Bass left the company and moved on to Meta.”
Gurman believes that 2022, the current year, is the end of Apple’s vehicle project. In November, Bloomberg reported that Apple plans to launch an autonomous vehicle in 2025.
For the past few years, Apple’s auto team has been striving for two roads at once. The first of these; Building a model with limited self-driving features, or a version with full self-driving capability, focusing on steering and acceleration, similar to many of Tesla’s current vehicles. The second is; vehicle production that does not require human intervention.
The new leader of the study was Apple Watch software manager Kevin Lynch. The people, who did not want to be identified because the interviews were private, said that Lynch had pushed for a car with a fully automatic driving system in the first version. We will keep you informed as details become available.
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