Apple
Apple has reportedly been working on self-driving car technology since 2014, but has had to deal with a number of prominent retiring employees in the past year. As reported by Bloomberg on Wednesday, the latest is CJ Moore, who joined the company only last August.
Before joining Apple, Moore was the director of Tesla’s Autopilot, where he worked on self-driving cars, even though he contradicted Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s bold timeline for the project when speaking with California regulators. It’s not clear exactly what Moore’s work at Apple has been since he joined the company.
In any case, he’s now moving to lidar company Luminar Technologies, which has aggressively hired prominent directors and executives from tech and auto giants. At Luminar, Moore will lead global software development for lidar-based functions to ensure passenger safety in autonomous vehicles.
Bloomberg notes that “almost the entire Apple Car management team” has left Apple in the past two years. The other notable departures included project lead Doug Field, who left last year to join Ford. Kevin Lynch, Apple’s vice president of technology, who worked at Adobe before joining Apple in 2013, is reportedly now heading Apple’s car project, internally called Project Titan.
While much of Apple is focused on the iPhone and other peripheral products and services, Project Titan is one of Apple’s two biggest efforts to develop a new product category that could be as successful and disruptive as the introduction of the iPhone.
The other effort is in mixed reality. Apple is reportedly working on VR and AR glasses, which recent behind-the-scenes reports have claimed stemmed in part from an acquisition of a company that made sensing technology for autonomous vehicles.
Both Project Titan and the mixed reality project have seen many bumps in the proverbial road, as is often the case with major new technology R&D projects. Apple is said to be in the early stages of development for self-driving cars, but multiple recent reports have claimed the company’s first mixed reality glasses are on the way to release.
