There was a time when the talk of the town was the Apple Car. But, lately, that has started to slow down. But that doesn’t mean Apple’s given up on whatever it is.
For example, Apple’s apparently put someone else in charge of the project as of pretty recently. That’s according to a report today from Bloomberg, which says the company has put John Giannandrea in charge of the Apple Car project. Giannandrea is still the company’s head of AI, being named Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy way back in December of 2018.
Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 as its vice president of AI Strategy and Machine Learning before being promoted to Apple’s executive team as a senior vice president later that year. He ran Google’s machine-learning and search teams before that. At Apple, in addition to the car project, he is in charge of Siri and machine-learning technologies across Apple’s products.
The Apple Car project’s previous lead, Bob Mansfield, has retired, according to the report.
Day-to-day operations will still be handled by Doug Field, but Giannandrea is now the lead on the entire project. What, exactly, Apple is doing under the Project Titan banner remains a mystery. It has something to do with autonomous vehicles, but the rumor mill has never really been able to pin down Apple’s plans up to this point.
Last we heard from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, for instance, Apple was developing its own custom chips for the self-driving vehicles, which could debut sometime between 2023 and 2025. And back in August of 2018, Kuo stated that the Apple Car (or Project Titan) was “back on track“, and that Apple would have something to show off sometime around 2024.
Whatever it is, Apple isn’t giving up on it right now. Are you still interested in Project Titan at this point?