Another manager of Apple's self-driving car team quits, and Project Titan suffers another setback

Recently, according to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, Apple has lost another manager of its "Project Titan" self-driving car team.

Joe Bass, the head of software engineering program management for Apple's automotive team, reportedly left the company recently after seven years at the company to become director of technology program management at Meta.

Mark Gurman wrote in the report:

With the departure of Bass, almost all of the Apple Auto management team a year ago has left. Dave Scott, Jaime Waydo, Dave Rosenthal and Benjamin Lyon all left in early 2021. Head Doug Field left in September; Michael Schwekutsch, who was in charge of Apple's project hardware, left soon after. Then all the other top engineers ran away. Bass had reported to Field, then moved to Kevin Lynch, the new head of Apple's automotive team, until now.

Previously, Apple planned to launch a self-driving electric car as early as 2025 (Apple's internal goal is to have a self-driving car within four years), faster than the five to seven years some engineers had planned. But the timing is not fixed, and its speed depends on how efficiently the company completes the self-driving system.

It is understood that the autonomous driving development direction set by Lynch is not simply to match existing electric vehicles with autonomous driving functions, but to achieve leapfrog development in the electric vehicle market through a car that can truly drive itself and carry passengers. .

For the past few years, Apple's automotive team has been exploring two simultaneous paths: One is to develop a vehicle with limited self-driving capabilities that focuses on steering and acceleration -- similar to Tesla Inc.'s existing Most of the models; the second is to develop a model with fully autonomous driving capabilities that does not require human intervention, but this is almost impossible.

However, Kevin Lynch, Apple's head of Apple Watch software, took the second path, and engineers under his leadership are now working on it.

The project lost more and more staff after Kevin Lynch's orders. Even the direction of development in the coming weeks and months is unpredictable.

Gurman said he has written about the loss of employees from the Project Titan team at least six times, stressing that 2022 will be a critical year for Apple's self-driving car team, and it will make or break it.

If Apple intends to unveil its plans for a fully self-driving car by 2025, they will need to get in on the action now, and nothing like this will happen again.