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Although there have been many news since the beginning of the year that Apple Car will be released early in September this year, Apple has not responded positively. What makes Apple even more embarrassing is that the talent team is constantly dug into the wall by other companies, and the new car has not yet come out but has been slammed by Tesla...
A few days ago, Tesla's chief designer Franz von Holtzhausen said in an interview with the podcast that he had no expectations for Apple's new design, believing that Apple's design was just "slightly improved on the same thing."
Earlier, Tesla CEO Elon Musk criticized Apple for building a "walled garden" ecosystem around the App Store. Earlier in 2015, Musk had jokingly called Apple "Tesla's grave" and claimed that "if you don't succeed at Tesla, you're going to work at Apple." ”
Apple President Tim Cook and Tesla founder Musk
But even if this kind of digging and robbing people, Apple's car-making project has been 8 years, and it has not even seen a movie until now, and the car-making team is still facing the threat of brain drain.
1
A battle for talent at the foot of each other's walls
Shortly after Apple issued a huge bonus, some people jumped ship and left, and they went to Apple's competitor Meta (formerly Facebook).
In January, Joe Bass, head of software engineering management for Apple's automotive team, recently left Apple after seven years on the job. This means that the early management of the Titan project (Apple's self-driving project) has all left.
In 2014, Apple launched an ambitious Titan project to try to build a self-driving car. Joe Bass also joined the program shortly thereafter, but at that time, Apple's project underwent a series of major changes, including the departure of the person in charge, the sharp reduction in the size of the team, etc., and the project also shifted from vehicle manufacturing to autonomous driving technology research and development.
In 2019, Apple adjusted its strategy, the acquisition of self-driving companies Drive.ai, Titan plans to move back to the vehicle manufacturing business, the new executive team was officially established a year ago, but with Bath's job-hopping, the senior management team of a year ago has all left, including the car high-pipe Ge Field who jumped from Tesla in the early years.
Field
With extensive knowledge and experience in transportation technology, Field has long been contested by major car companies. He spent his early years as a vehicle development engineer and team leader at Ford Motor Company and as a prototyping design and technical lead at Deca R&D.
After serving as CTO of a Segway, Field joined Apple in 2008. Five years later, Field was poached by Tesla for a high salary and worked as a top engineer at Tesla, responsible for the research and development of the Model 3.
To this end, a fierce talent war broke out between Tesla and Apple. By 2015, Tesla had snatched 150 employees from Apple. Despite Apple's efforts to use the lure of high salaries — a $250,000 signing bonus , plus a 60 percent pay rise — it still outperformed Tesla's digging efforts.
In 2015, Apple hired not only a senior engineer from Tesla, but also Megan McClain, an engineer in self-driving at Volkswagen, and Viney Palakkode at Carnegie Mellon University's Autopilot Research Center. Apple also nearly went to court because of the poaching: lithium battery maker A123 Systems LLC took apple to court for poaching their scientists. Fortunately, the two sides later reached a settlement. In addition, Apple poached 170 employees from Ford.
By the end of 2019, Apple had poached a total of 500 employees from Tesla, including Andrew King, chief car designer in charge of four areas of car body design, automotive powertrain, vehicle research and development engineering, and automotive interiors, Michael Schwekutsch, vice president of drive, DougField, former senior vice president, and Steve MacManus, vice president of engineering.
In August 2018 alone, Apple poached 46 former Tesla employees, covering manufacturing, security, and software engineering. This includes the aforementioned Field. Field returned to Apple from Tesla to take charge of Its self-driving car project Titan and report to Senior Vice President Bob Mansfield. But within 3 years, Field jumped ship again and returned to the arms of his old club, Ford.
After Field's departure, after months of decision-making, Apple chose Kevin Lynch, an executive who is not an auto industry veteran, to lead the auto project. This is Apple's fifth director in the 7 years since it launched the Titan project.
Kevin Lynch shows off the Apple Watch
The Apple auto team has garnered the top self-driving stars, including several former Tesla executives, including Michael Schwekutsch and Stuart Bowers. After Lynch arrived, he recruited a number of engineers from Tesla, including self-driving expert Christopher Lynch. Christopher CJ Moore.
In addition, Apple has hired air conditioning system experts at Volvo, managers at Daimler Trucks, battery system engineers at Karma Automotive and other automakers, sensor engineers at Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, and automotive safety engineers at companies like Joyson Safety Systems.
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Can Lynch save apple cars
Can Lynch, who once helped Apple launch core products such as apple watches, help Apple Car out of trouble?
Although he has no experience with automotive hardware or autonomous driving, given his senior experience in product development, many engineers see his appointment as a positive sign.
The Apple concept car of network exposure
One of Lynch's big moves after taking office was to adjust Apple's automotive strategy. Since the titan project was launched, Apple has tried to explore electric vehicles in two directions: cars with limited self-driving capabilities, focusing on functions such as automatic steering and acceleration, similar to most cars currently on the market; and fully autonomous vehicles that do not require human intervention.
In the first direction, Apple has never found its core competitiveness, that is, an experience that can amaze users, after all, Tesla has done a good enough job in this regard. That being the case, it is better to continue to work the road of subversion. To this end, Lynch has shifted his focus to the second direction, fully promoting the development of vehicles equipped with fully autonomous driving systems.
However, in the direction of fully autonomous driving, global automakers have been groping for more than a decade, and they have not been satisfied. Even Tesla, the bellwether, is said to be years away from launching a fully autonomous vehicle.
Waymo, owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, is also a veteran on the track, but its Waymo One still has regional limitations and has recently suffered a series of departures in the process of developing the technology.
Unable to withstand the rhythm of self-driving burning money, taxi company Uber sold its self-driving unit Uber ATG in 2020.
Although the difficulty of development was far greater than expected, Apple identified this as a necessary path. The Apple CEO told investors on a conference call:
"The application scenarios and methods of automation systems will be very extensive. We can't just limit our vision to transportation, there are many areas waiting for us to explore and practice..."
"We are very focused on automated systems. Knowing that this is a big project, we have invested a lot of money and energy to keep it running properly. From our perspective, in a sense, automation is the mother of all AI projects. ”
For Apple, the significance of developing autonomous driving has been far more than just a means of transportation, but for the future-oriented metacosm. Metaverse is the aggregation of technological innovations such as VR/AR, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and digital twins, of which artificial intelligence plays a key role and plays an important role in the development of metaverse.
To this end, Apple has accelerated its automotive strategy faster than some engineers plan in the early 2021 period of 5 to 7 years, and expects to launch self-driving cars within 4 years. The goal of achieving autonomous driving in 2025 is believed to be Apple's time prediction for the large-scale application of the metacosm.
Although many people in the team are skeptical about the 2025 target, the good news is starting to come one after another. Last November, Apple completed much of the core work on the first-generation car processors, a key milestone apple reached in developing the self-driving system on the ground floor of the car.
The car chip is the most advanced component developed in-house by Apple and consists mainly of neural processors that can handle the artificial intelligence needed for autonomous driving. However, the chip was designed by Apple's chip engineering team, not by the automotive team itself. The chip engineering team designed processors for iPhones, iPads, and Macs, and the work included polishing the underlying software running on the chips to support autonomous driving capabilities.
Apple uses Lexus cars to test on the road
Cars fitted with new processors will soon be put on the road. The California Department of Motor Vehicles confirmed that Apple currently has 69 Lexus modified vehicles testing its technology. This news is enough to make the market full of imagination for Apple cars.
If it doesn't sound, it's already a hit. Apple, under Cook's leadership, will still redefine the car with its leading technological advantage, and Tesla's real rival will arrive. Can Musk still laugh?
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