Apple is injecting its self-driving electric car project with new talent, appointing leading Apple Watch software executive Kevin Lynch, after the project’s previous lead left to join Ford.
Lynch, who originally hailed from design software company Adobe, joined Apple in 2013 to run the software group for the company’s fitness and smartwatch arm.
H replaces Doug Field to head up the computing and smartphone giant’s electric car department according to Bloomberg, a project that periodically makes headlines but has not yet produced anything visible to the public eye.
Known as Project Titan, it was thought that Apple had pulled the plug on its electric car project in 2016 when it was reported that many employees were let go, reassigned or had quit.
Reports emerging from time, such as this one about a “breakthrough battery” and this one about a deal with LG-Magna, and this one about a deal with Hyundai, have continued to feed the Apple car rumour mill.
But the project lives on, apparently. And if the deal with Hyundai proves true (neither company have made an official announcement), an Apple car could be forthcoming by 2024.
An Apple electric car, if it does eventually eventuate, would not be all that surpising. Tesla is considered more software company than automotive, and numerous other tech giants – Baidu, Google, Huawei and Foxconn to name a few, are getting in on the electric car action.
An interesting aside: as Steve Hanley noted in 2016, Musk had mused that year that he’d like to one day see Tesla worth as much as Apple, which at that point is worth around $US700 billion.
Today, Tesla is worth $US750 billion, but is still lagging after the smartphone giant which is now worth $US2.5 trillion by market cap.
