Former Wall Street Journal reporter Jessia Lessin’s outlet, The Information, this morning ran a story behind a paywall claiming that Apple’s tentative 2020 launch target for a rumored autonomous electric vehicle may have slipped until 2021. Project Titan, as it’s code-named, “has run into challenges” after its top executive left in January, as per sources.
“One person who worked briefly with the Titan team was told during their tenure at Apple that the company had been trying to deliver a vehicle by 2020 but the target slipped to 2021,” say people briefed about aspects of the project.
The story is actually an in-depth profile about the Sumner brothers— Brian, Kevin and Michael—who joined Apple in early 2011 to work on Siri and are now allegedly part of the Project Titan team.
Brian is a software engineer, Kevin’s expertise is infrastructure engineering and Brian, who graduated from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, is also an engineer.
“All three brothers, who range in age from 27 to the mid-30s, had studied computer science at UNC, about 60 miles south of the rural county where they grew up, near the Virginia border,” notes the article.
The Silicon Valley Business Journal learned in November 2015 that Apple had quietly leased a 96,000-square-foot site in Sunnyvale, California which used to be Pepsi’s bottling plant, for its not-so-secretive electric vehicle project.
Project Titan was headed by Apple’s Vice President of Product Design, Steve Zadesky, who left the company in January 2016 for personal reasons.
Photo: Apple’s existing CarPlay in-car infotainment software.
Source: The Information