Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is back with another tweet. This time, Kuo says the Apple Car project team has been dissolved for “some time,” and it needs to have a reorganization within the next three to six months to achieve the goal of mass production by 2025.
Rumors about the Apple Car are weird. Sometimes it looks like Apple has figured out how to make this car, other times it doesn’t. After losing several top executives and engineers, Project Titan has been under Kevin Lynch since September of 2021.
Lynch has been at Apple since 2013, joining the company after a career at Adobe where he helped lead the development of Flash. With the title of VP of technology, Lynch has played a major in the development of the Apple Watch and its associated health features over the years.
While Lynch himself does not have experience in the car industry, Bloomberg said in a report last year that Apple has “a few senior managers still on the project that come from the automotive world,” including former executives from Tesla and BMW.
Not only that, but a report from a couple of weeks ago shows that two Apple suppliers are gearing up for car production to win the Project Titan business:
Taiwan-based Foxconn, the largest iPhone assembler, confirmed its plans to build electric vehicles in North America by 2023. Confirmed last year, the company is scouting locations across the US and Mexico.
China-based Luxshare has joined the market through its partnership with The Chery Group to produce electric vehicles. This is a significant relationship for Apple as it can help the company enter the Chinese market.
As reported by DigiTimes Asia, analysts predict the car could enter volume production within the next one to two years. However, industry sources claim the timeline is a bit early for Apple to have done necessary road testing.
Kuo’s tweet comes along with another report by Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman. In January, he said that the Apple Car project was in a “make-or-break year” after Joe Bass, who was the head of software engineering program management for Apple’s car team, left.
Apple is internally targeting a launch of its self-driving car in four years, faster than the five- to seven-year timeline that some engineers had been planning for earlier this year. But the timing is fluid, and hitting that 2025 target is dependent on the company’s ability to complete the self-driving system – an ambitious task on that schedule.
You can read everything we know about the Apple Car here.
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