Apple’s self-driving car development efforts, codenamed Project Titan, have been well-documented over the years. Project Titan has gone through numerous leadership changes, shifts in strategy, and more.
A new report from The Information today goes in-depth on Apple Car, including details on the car’s design, Jony Ive’s involvement, Craig Federighi’s skepticism, and the so-called “jogger incident.”
Apple Car turmoil
According to the report, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, is a noted skeptic of Apple’s Project Titan. Federighi is not directly involved in the Apple Car’s development but has reportedly voiced his concerns privately to some other executives at Apple.
The report goes on to note that Tim Cook is only overseeing the project from afar and “rarely visits” the offices of Project Titan in Santa Clara, California. Some employees told The Information that Cook’s distant leadership has hurt the project, which lacks a “singular figure who can clearly define and articulate what the product should be.”
Cook has also been “unwilling to commit to mass projection of a vehicle,” the report says, frustrating some senior executives working on Project Titan.
Coupled with Cook’s distant leadership and Federighi’s skepticism, Project Titan has also undergone multiple executive changes. Ian Goodfellow was at one point leading the machine learning development for Apple’s self-driving car technology, but he departed Apple earlier this year.
Doug Field took over Project Titan management from Bob Mansfield in 2018, which led to an “era of stability” for Apple Car. In fact, some employees told The Information that leadership under Field was the company’s “best shot at releasing a car.” Then, Field announced his departure in September of 2021 after being poached by Ford.
Apple Car design and Jony Ive
As it stands today, Kevin Lynch is leading the Apple Car development, as was previously reported by Bloomberg. The goal is to mass-produce a vehicle for consumers.
Employees are now discussing how to disguise a new version of a self-driving test vehicle that more closely resembles the final version of the car Apple wants to produce and could hit the road as early as next year. The proposed car is codenamed M101, and the M-based designation means Apple has assigned a codename to a “product” it might sell, not just a technology it is developing, according to two people familiar with the project. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Cook is poised to greenlight a major expansion.
Apple’s former chief design officer Jony Ive is also involved on a consulting basis through his firm LoveFrom. Ive has reportedly told the Apple Car team that it should “lean into the weirdness” of the car’s design and “not try to hide its sensors.”
The current design of the car is said to feature “four seats that face inward so passengers can talk to one another and a curved ceiling similar to the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle.”
Apple Car designers are also “experimenting” with a trunk compartment that automatically rises and lowers to give owners “easier access to the storage space.” The team has also discussed “large screens that rise from behind the seats and lower when they aren’t in use” and a design that would allow passengers to “lie flat and sleep in the vehicle.”
Apple reportedly hopes to “gain exemptions” from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to remove the steering wheel and brakes, relying fully on self-driving technology.
In regards to the self-driving technology, the Apple Car team has reportedly crafted multiple demo videos with high production value to show off to Tim Cook and other executives. The team also took Cook on a ride inside a test vehicle in Santa Clara Valley. This vehicle completed that ride without incident and even “performed a DMV driving test autonomously to show off its capacities.”
Last August, Apple sent several of its prototype self-driving cars on a roughly 40-mile trek through Montana. Aerial drones filmed the drive, from Bozeman to the ski resort town of Big Sky, so that Apple managers could produce a polished film, with picturesque mountains in the background, to show CEO Tim Cook how their costly and long-running autonomous car project, Titan, was making progress.
The good vibes following the Bozeman demo didn’t last long. Apple’s test vehicles, which are modified Lexus SUVs, struggled to navigate streets near its Silicon Valley headquarters without the maps, smacking into curbs and sometimes having trouble staying in their lanes while crossing intersections, according to two people who worked on the program.
The “jogger incident”
Earlier this year, however, one of Apple’s test vehicles nearly struck a jogger while driving at around 15 miles per hour. The car’s software “first identified the jogger as a stationary object” before recategorizing it as a “stationary person” then finally a “moving pedestrian.”
But even with that correct identification, the car “only slightly adjusted its path.” The backup human driver then “slammed the brakes at the last moment” and the car “stopped within a few feet of the pedestrian.” Had the human not intervened, Apple’s tests indicated that the car “would have almost certainly hit the jogger.”
After this, Apple “temporarily grounded its fleet to investigate” the “jogger incident.” The company fixed the identification issue and added the crosswalk to its maps database.
The full report from The Information is well worth a read and provides one of our most in-depth looks yet at the turmoil inside Project Titan.
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