Apple Hires Blackberry Exec for Car Project; Project Team Heads in New Direction
Apple’s annoyingly mysterious self-driving unicorn car project has a new team member.
Dan Dodge, founder and former CEO of Blackberry’s QNX automotive software division, has already joined the ranks of Apple’s shadowy “Project Titan” team, Bloomberg reports. After endless speculation about the future iCar (and what it will look like), sources close to the company say the project is now moving in different direction.
Is the Apple car fading from view?
The sources, who claim knowledge of Apple’s self-driving car project, told Bloomberg that the team’s leader, Bob Mansfield, is shifting the focus onto developing autonomous driving technology. The car project reportedly still exists, but the effort now lies elsewhere.
Recently, Apple announced plans to open an R&D facility near QNX’s headquarters in Ottawa, Canada. The proximity of the two facilities raises eyebrows.
Last year, we were told that the car would exist in some form by 2019. That meant anything from a production-ready vehicle to a blueprint. The unveiling date was then pushed back to 2020. Now, we’re hearing that the wraps won’t come off until 2021.
Apple is treating Project Titan like the Manhattan Project. Little, if any, usable information leaks out. At least, not from official channels. Research and development spending is up at Apple, but CEO Tim Cook didn’t have much useful to say during a conference call this week.
“There’s a lot of stuff that we’re doing beyond the current products,” Cook said. You can almost feel that car, can’t you?
While the Apple car exists as a celebrity ghost for now, there’s some reason to believe a driveable product will one day roll out of the company’s labs. (Though possibly not as a production vehicle.) If Apple wanted to test its autonomous technology through a fleet of road-going vehicles, it could have gone the Google route.
In May, Google partnered with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to test its technology on a fleet of 100 Chrysler Pacifica minivans. That option is still open to Apple, but the company’s been dead silence on the possibility of partnering with an automaker.
More by Steph Willems
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I wonder if all this Apple Car stuff is actual the development around a software / hardware package to add safety features to other cars and not an Apple designed and built car. In other words, this is imilar to CarPlay but way more advanced. My though process is this - Apple does a huge mount of R&D work in many fields: miniaturization, battery tech , cameras, user interface, software optimization and most recently upscale marketing (Apple Stores, the AppleWatch). These don't point to making a car, they point to making a system an OEM would buy to add to their car. Which of course would then be sold onto a consumer as an upsell. IE: you can have our standard package or the "Apple Safe" package for $$ more. This way you could buy a Ford, BMW or Chevy with "Apple Safe" baked in. Such a product would include a unique user interface to manage options such a limiting a teen drivers speed, to active safety like auto braking, to fancy pants stuff like Telsa's "find a parking space and automatically park my car there". My guess is there would also be a monthly fee similar to OnStar for other services like finding the nearest charging location.
It would be better to develop the technology, brand it, and let automakers license it, akin to what Bose does with car audio. I have to assume that this is what Apple is doing, and that any car that it may assemble would be for demonstration purposes only.