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Just two days after Ford hired Doug Field, the head of Apple’s secret car project, the tech giant brought in Apple Watch executive and former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch to take his place, according to Bloomberg.
This is the latest changing of the guard for the project, known as Project Titan, which has turned leaders about as much as it would have shifted focus. Namely, Korea Maeil economic daily reported earlier Thursday that Apple may no longer be trying to work with other automakers to bring its self-driving electric car to life. On the contrary, the report says, Apple now plans to go it alone.
Lynch started working on the project in July, when he was hired to help develop the vehicle’s software. He joined Apple in 2013 from Adobe, where he was the company’s chief technology officer. There, he wrote Adobe’s official response to Apple’s decision to keep Flash out of iOS.
With curiosity, Bloomberg writes that Lynch still reports to Apple COO Jeff Williams, not John Giannandrea, the company’s chief AI officer, who was hired last year to oversee the car project.
Field, meanwhile, led Project Titan from 2018 until this week when he was poached by Ford. Prior to that, he spent years at Tesla helping market cars like the Model 3. (Prior to that, he worked at … Apple.)
Launched in 2014 as part of a reported effort to build an electric car, Apple eventually pivoted the project to focus on the autonomous driving tech stack. But recently, it seems to have backed down, starting conversations with major Asian automakers along the way (as well as considering buying electric vehicle startup Canoo). At this point, however, it might as well exist in a quantum state for anyone not actually working on the project. Until we look at it, the Apple Car is everything and nothing at the same time.
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