Okay, so far we’ve had a lot of information about reported turnover at Apple’s mysterious project for autonomous vehicles. Many engineers reportedly left the project to join other companies. Now, AppleInsider reports that another Apple Car engineer is leaving the company, and this time he will join Meta (former Facebook).
Another Apple Car engineer leaves and joins Meta
Apple’s long-running self-driving car project seems to be experiencing a lot of setbacks recently, mostly due to the loss of engineering executives and other key personnel and fairly constant staff turnover.
It looks like this pattern will continue into 2022. This time it’s Apple Car’s head of software engineering, Joe Bass, who is said to have left Cupertino to join Meta. Joe Bass had been the Senior Engineering Program Manager for Autonomous Systems at Apple since early 2015. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has now left Apple for a fresh start.
His new role is Director of Technical Program Management, Mixed Reality Technologies at Meta (formerly Facebook). Bass’s departure comes after several other engineers did the same in December, the majority of them appearing to go to air taxi startup Archer Aviation and another similar company, Joby Aviation.
The Apple Car Project: how does it work?
Keep in mind that the Apple Car project is still just a rumor and has not been officially announced. The most recent news on this is the report that the company is looking to announce its main partners for the project later this year. This information comes from South Korean sources: it seems that Cupertino has been looking for South Korean automakers to possibly strike a deal with them for Apple Car components. This information seems to indicate that Apple plans to ship an Apple Car by 2025. The eventual announcement of the partnerships could give us more information on how soon we expect to see this still mysterious self-driving car. And from that high level of revenue, one can’t help but assume that things aren’t going exactly as planned for the Apple Car.
The Apple car might look something like this
This image is part of the new creation The Apple Car renderings we talked about earlier come from UK car rental company Vanarama, and of course they’re based on patents filed by Apple as well as previously released Apple devices.
It’s indeed very early to know for sure if the Apple Car will look like the image above, but it looks cool, doesn’t it?
Apple Car revenue has been very high recently
There were a lot of people leaving and joining the supposed Apple Car project in recent months, particularly in November and December of last year. Some of its key engineers left to join air taxi startups, while other ex-Tesla engineers joined to take their place.
To name a few, Eric Rogers, who was Apple’s chief radar systems engineer for the self-driving vehicle project, left to join Joby Aviation Inc, a flying taxi startup. Alex Clarabut, who was engineering manager for the team’s battery systems group, has now joined Archer Aviation, another company working on air taxis.
The third person who recently left Apple is Stephen Spiteri, who was responsible for hardware engineering, and he also went ahead and joined Archer. The two flying taxi companies have confirmed the appointments.
All of these personnel changes show how the Cupertino-based tech giant faces many challenges as it expands into an entirely new industry. Of course, building and selling a self-driving car represents a massive new sales opportunity, one of its famous “next things.” We’ll see how Apple copes with the challenges that come with it.
