The road ahead looks bumpy for the Apple Car.
A new report reveals that the effort, dubbed Project Titan and dating back to 2014, was plagued by a “revolving door of leaders,” time wasted on tight demos and a lack of commitment to mass production from CEO Tim Cook.
According to a report by The information That is based on conversations with 20 employees of the company. Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi is “particularly skeptical” about the project and has expressed concerns to other senior executives at Apple.
Cook — who “rarely” visits the project’s offices in Santa Clara, California — was also “unwilling to commit to mass projection of a vehicle,” the report says, frustrating other company leaders.
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Apple Car is plagued with management attrition, ever-changing goals and a lack of full commitment from the company’s top leaders, The Information states. Pictured is a prototype of the vehicle based on actual Apple patents
The Apple Car effort, dubbed Project Titan, has been beset by a series of problems, according to a new report in The Information based on interviews with 20 employees.
Project Titan has been led at various times by Ian Goodfellow, Bob Mansfield, Doug Field and Kevin Lynch.
Earlier this year, one of Apple’s test vehicles nearly hit a jogger while traveling at about 25 miles per hour.
The Information reports that the car’s software first identified the jogger as a “stationary object” before recategorizing it as a “stationary person” and then as a “moving pedestrian.”
But even with that change, the car has “only changed its path a little bit.”
Earlier this year, one of Apple’s test vehicles nearly hit a jogger while traveling at about 25 miles per hour. Pictured above is a prototype of the Apple Car
Fortunately, the backup human driver stepped on the brakes ‘at the last minute’, bringing the vehicle to a stop ‘a few feet’ from the jogger.
If humans hadn’t intervened, Apple’s testing indicated that the car “almost certainly would have hit the jogger.”
Following the incident, Apple reportedly grounded its fleet of test vehicles to investigate what happened and added the crosswalk to its map database.
The current look of the car features “four seats that face inwards so passengers can talk to each other and a curved ceiling that resembles the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle,” the report claims. Pictured above is a prototype of the car’s interior based on Apple patents
The notification of issues comes at a time when a survey is in Consumer Reports reveals that 28 percent of Americans “wouldn’t consider” buying an electric vehicle — be it from Apple, Tesla or one of the major automakers.
Consumer Reports states that the most common concerns mentioned in that segment were charging, travel range and cost.
Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer who was instrumental in designing most of the company’s most popular products, is reportedly in talks with the tech giant and has told the Apple Car team to “be in the craziness’ of the design and ‘don’t try to hide the sensors.’
The current look of the car features “four seats that face inwards for passengers to talk to each other and a curved ceiling that resembles the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle,” reports The Information.
Apple Car designers are apparently experimenting with a trunk that automatically raises and lowers to give owners “easier access to storage space.”
They also considered a design that would allow passengers to “lay flat and sleep in the vehicle,” the tech news site said.
The Apple Car team shot several tight demo videos for Cook and other high-level leaders — including a 40-mile trek through Montana filmed by drones — to demonstrate the project’s progress.
However, the example also showed engineers ‘wasting precious time choreographing demonstrations’ along familiar routes, proving that the technology works in specific places, but virtually nowhere else.
“If you spend enough money, you can get almost any regular route to work,” former Uber engineer Arun Venkatadri told The Information. ‘But what is not shown is whether you can build self-driving software in a scalable way and whether you can operate in a fairly broad area.’
The Cupertino, California-based company is reportedly still targeting 2025 for a possible launch of its self-driving vehicle.